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ELEVATIONS OF THE HEIGHTS OF EGYPT, SINAI & PALESTINE. 



Du* Maps are ccJonrcd according to the appearance wlurii tke cfunjlrv actually presents. 

I —I__j_J Piugke Red _ Grani te «V Basalt 

L :i .Light Red _ Sajidslm *. 

C-_ . I Grev _ Limestiru 

Dari\ Green _ jFrrr.it. 

I.. -- 1 Light Lnrn Pasture iand 

l-1 Dark Ycllvw _ Com Land. 

I— 1 Lightlettiw _ Sand, 

Brr »n The drivel of tin Desert 

1 - White _ White limestone, Salt. cr Amt 

The modem names in Maps where the two are mixed i are in brackets. 


Thf Ma/>*h,nr brut) cmstnirted nith the help of M r Tetetm.aein ,fuirth\- firm ihservatwn on the spot .puilr thru the. auips ot liussa/er,ISepert ivmltuumer 
















































































SINAI AND PALESTINE 


IN CONNECTION WITH TIIEIlt HISTORY. 


BY ARTHUR PENRHYN ^STANLEY, M.A. 

u 

CANON OF CANTERBURY. 




LONDON: 

JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET. 
1850 . • 



\ 




LONDON: 

BRADBURY AND EVANS, PRINTERS, WH1TEFUJA HS. 





CONTENTS. 


ADVERTISEMENT.. vii 

PREFACE: 

Connection op Sacred History and Sacred Geography . . . x 

INTRODUCTION : 

Egypt in relation to Israel. 

1. Nile on the Delta. 2. View from the Citadel at Cairo. 3. Heliopolis. 4. 
Valley of the Nile. 5. Tomhs of Beni-Hassan. 6., Tombs and Hermits. 

7. Thebes—Colossal statues. 8. Thebes—Kamac and the Royal Tombs. 

9. Nile at Silsilis. 10. At the First Cataract. 11. Philse. 12. Nile in 
Nubia. 13. Ipsambul. 14. Nile at the Second Cataract. 15. Dendera. 

10. Memphis. 17. The Pyramids ...... xxvii 


CHAPTER I. PART I.—PENINSULA OF SINAI. 

I. General configuration—the Mountains, the Desert, and the Sea. 1. The Two 

Gulfs. 2. The Plateau of the Tih. 3. The Sandy Tract of Debbet-er- 
Ramleh. 4. The Mountains of the Tor. a. The Kaa — the Shores. 
b. The Passes, c. The Mountains ; the Three Groups—the Colours—the 
Confusion—the Desolation—the Silence, d. The W&dys—the Vegetation 
—the Springs—the Oases ......... 2 

II. General Adaptation to the History. The Scenery—the Physical Phenomena 

—the Present Inhabitants—Changes in the Features of the Desert . . 20 

III. Local Traditions of the History. 1. Arab Tradition—Traditions of Moses. 

Loss of the Ancient Names. 2. Greek Traditions. 3. Early Traditions 

of Eusebius and Jerome.......... 29 

IV. Route of the Israelites. 1. Passage of the Red Sea. 2. Marah and Elim. 

3. Encampment by the Red Sea. 4. Wilderness of Sin. 5. Choice between 
Serbal and Gebel Mousa as Sinai. 6. Special Localities of the History . 35 

V. Later History of the Peninsula. 1. Elijah’s Visit. 2. Josephus. 3. Allu¬ 

sions of St. Paul. 4. Christian Hermitages ; Convent of St. Catherine. 

5. Mosque in the Convent : Visit of Mahomet. 6. Present State of the 


Convent. 7. Sanctuary of Sheykh Saleh ...... 4S 

Note A. Mussulman Traditions of the Exodus and Mount Sinai . . . . 57 

Note B. Sinaitic Inscriptions . . . . . . . . .59 


PART II.—EXTRACTS FROM JOURNALS. 

I. Departure from Egypt; Overland Route ; First Encampment. II. The 
Passage of the Red Sea. 1. Approach to Suez. 2. Suez. 3. Wells of 







IV 


CONTENTS. 


Moses. III. The Desert, and Sandstorm. IV. Marah; Elim. V. Second 
Encampment by the Red Sea; “Wilderness of Sin.” VI. Approach to 
Mount Serbal; W&dy Sidri and W&dy Feiran. VII. Ascent of Serbal. 
VIII. Approach to Gebel Mousa, the traditional Sinai. IX. Ascent of 
Gebel Mousa and of Has Sasafeh. X. Ascent of St. Catherine. XI. Ascent 

of the Gebel-ed-Deir . . . . ..64 

XII. Route from Sinai to the Gulf of Akaba. 1. Tomb of Sheykh Saleh. 

2. Whdy Sayal and Wady El Ain. Hazeroth. XIII. Gulf of Akaba ; 
Elath. XIV. The Arabah. XV. Approach to Petra. XVI. Ascent of 

Mount Hor. XVII. Petra: Kadesh .78 

XVIII. Approach to Palestine. XIX. First Day in Palestine. XX. Hebron. 

XXI. Approach to Bethlehem and Jerusalem. XXII. Fiist View of Beth¬ 
lehem. XXIII. First View of Jerusalem ..99 


CHAPTER II.—PALESTINE. 

The Highland of Syria : Lebanon ; the Four Rivers : the Orontes, the Leontes, 

the Barada, and the Jordan ......... 109 

PALESTINE. I. Seclusion. II. Smallness and narrowness of it3 territory. 

III. Central situation. IV. Land of Ruins. V. “Land of Milk and 
Honey.” VI. Variety of climate and structure. VII. A Mountain- 
Country ; the Views of Sacred History. The fenced Cities, and High 
Places : Political Divisions and Conquests. High-lands and Lowlands. 

VIII. Scenery : Character of hills ; Vegetation : Flowers ; Olives; Cedars 
—confined to Lebanon ; Oaks and Terebinths ; Sacred Trees : Palms; 
Sycomores ; Oleanders. IX. Geological Features : 1. Springs and Wells ; 

2. Sepulchres ; 3. Caves ; in ancient times ; in modern times ; 4. Legendary 
curiosities . . . . . . . . , . . .1.2 


CHAPTER III.—JUDiEA AND JERUSALEM. 

JUDASA : I. The “south” frontier—Simeon. II. Mountain country of Judah 
—Lion of Judah — Vineyards—Fenced cities — Herodion. Bethlehem: 
Hebron ............ 159 

Jerusalem : I. Exterior aspect. 1. Long obscurity—Jebus—Mountain fastness. 

2. Ravines of the Kedron and of Hinnom. 3. Compactness—Growth. 

4. Surrounding mountains. 5. Central situation. II. Interior aspect. 

1. Hills of the city. 2. Temple-mount—Rock of the Sakrah—Spring in 
the Temple Vaults. 3. Walls and Towers—Palaces—Ruins. III. Mount 
of Olives— Slight connection with the early history. Connection with the 
Gospel History—Presence of Christ—Bethany—Scene of the Triumphal 
entry—The Ascension—Conclusion.165 


CHAPTER IV.—THE HEIGHTS AND THE PASSES OF BENJAMIN. 

Benjamin, the frontier tribe of Judah and Ephraim—Its independent power. 

I. The Passes of Benjamin. 1. The Eastern Passes, a. Battle of Ai. 
b. Battle of Michmash. c. Advance of Sennacherib. 2. The Western 
Passes—Battle of Bethhoron under Joshua. Later battles of Bethhoron . 195 
II. The Heights. 1. Nebi-Samuel or Gibeon ; 2. Bethel: Sanctuary—View 
of Abraham—Sanctuary of Jacob and of the Northern tribes—Jeroboam’s 

Temple—Josiah.. . . . .209 

Note on Ramah and Mizpeh ..220 


CHAPTER V.—EPHRAIM. 

Mountains of Ephraim —Fertility and central situation—Supremacy of Ephraim. 225 
I. Shiloh. II. Sheohem. 1. First halting-place of Abraham. 2. First 
settlement of Jacob. 3. First capital of the conquest. Sanctuary of 






V 


CONTENTS. 

Mount Gerizim. 4. Insurrection of Abimelech. 5. Sanctuary of the 


Samaritans. 6. Jacob’s well.227 

III. Samaria : Its beauty—Its strength—Sebaste. IY. Passes of Manasseh. 

Dothan ..239 

Note on Mount Gerizim. Abraham and Melchizedek. Sacrifice of Isaac. 

Mount Moriah ........... 245 


CHAPTER VI.—THE MARITIME PLAIN. 

I. The Shephelah, the Low Country, or Philistia : 1. Maritime character of 

the Philistines. 2. The Strongholds; their sieges. 3. Corn-fields—Contact 
with Dan. 4. Level plain—Contact with Egypt and the Desert . .251 

II. Plain of Sharon — Pasture-land—Naphath-Dor—Forest—Caesarea—Con¬ 

nection with Apostolic History.255 

III. Plain and Bat of Acre —Tribe of Asher.259 

IY. Plain of Phoenicia : 1. Separation from Palestine. 2. Harbours. 3. 

Security. 4. Rivers: Tyre and Sidon —Local Prophecies . . . 262 


CHAPTER VII.—THE JORDAN AND THE DEAD SEA. 


The Four Rivers of Lebanon in their courses :—The physical peculiarities of the 

Jordan—Unfrequented—Historical scenes . . . . . .275 

I. Yale of Siddim. 1. Battle of the Kings. 2. Overthrow of Sodom and 
Gomorrah. 3. Appearance of the Dead Sea. 4. Vision of Ezekiel. 

5. En-gedi.281 


II. Plain and Terraces of the Jordan Valley. 1. Plain of Abel-Shittim—Encamp¬ 
ment of the Israelites—Views from Pisgah by Balaam and by Moses— 
Burial-place of Moses—Passage of the Jordan—Drying up of the River. 

2. Jericho—At the time of the capture—In the time of the Prophets and 
of Christ. 3. Scene of the Preaching of John—Bethabara—Scene of the 
Temptation—Baptism in the Jordan—Bathing of the Pilgrims . . .290 


CHAPTER VIII.—PEREA AND THE TRANS-JORDANIC TRIBES. 

I. General character of the scenery. II. First view of the Holy Land. 

III. Frontier land.—First victories of Israel. IV. Isolation. Y. Pastoral 
character of the country and its inhabitants. Nomadic Tribes—Reuben— 

Gad—Manasseh—Elijah the Tishbite. YI. Land of exile. Last view of 
the Holy Land . . . . . . . . » . .313 


CHAPTER IX.—PLAIN OF ESDRAELON, 

General features. I. Boundary between northern and central tribes. II. Battle¬ 
field of Palestine. 1. Victory over Sisera. Battle of Kishon. 2. Victory 
over the Midianites. 3. Defeat of Saul. Battle of Mount Gilboa—Beth- 
shan and Jabesh Gilead. 4. Defeat of Josiah—Battle of Megiddo . . 327 

III. Richness and fertility of the Plain — Issachar : Jezreel — Engannim. 

IV. Tabor: Fortress and Sanctuary of the Northern Tribes. V. Carmel-— 
Scene of Elijah’s sacrifice. VI. Nain .340 


CHAPTER X.—GALILEE. 

Scenery of Northern Palestine—The Four Northern Tribes—Their wealth—their 

isolation—Galilee in the New Testament ...... 353 

I. Nazareth —Its upland basin—Its seclusion—Sacred localities . . .356 

II. Lake of Gennesareth. 1. Plain of Hattin and Mountain of the Beatitudes 
—Battle of Hattin. 2. View of the Lake of Gennesareth. 3. Jewish History 
of Tiberias. 4. Plain of Gennesareth. Traffic—Fertility of the Plain— 
Villas of the Herods—Fisheries of the Lake. 5. Scene of the Gospel 








CONTENTS. 


vi 


Minis try —“Manufacturing district”—The Beach—The Desert—The storms 
of wind—The Demoniacs—The Feeding of the Multitudes—The Plain of 
Gennesareth—Capernaum ........ . 360 

CHAPTER XI.—THE LAKE OF MEROM AXD THE SOURCES OF 

THE JORDAN. 

I. Upper Valley of the Jordan—Hills of Naphthali and Manasseh—Kedesh- 
Naphthali. IL Lake of Merom—Battle of Merom. HI. Sources of the 
Jordan—Tel-el-Kadi—City and Tribe of Dan—Caesarea Philippi—fiazor— 
Paneas—Hermon—Mount of the Transfiguration .... . 381 


CHAPTER XII.—LEBAXOX—DAMASCUS. 

Lebanon. L In relation to Palestine and the Jordan. H. To the Leontes. 


III. To the Orontes. TV. To the Barada. Damascus .... 397 

Note A.—The Traditional Localities of Damascus ...... 403 

Note B.—Patriarchal Traditions of Lebanon.404 


CHAPTER XIII.—THE GOSPEL HISTORY AXD TEACHIXG, 

VIEWED IX CONNECTION WITH THE LOCALITIES OF PALESTINE. 

L The stages of the Gospel History. 1. Infancy of Christ. 2. Youth. 3. Pub¬ 
lic ministry. 4. Retirement from public ministry. H. The Parables. 
1. Parables of Judsa. a. The Vineyard. 6. The Fig-tree. c. The 
Shepherd, d. The good Samaritan. 2. Parables of Galilee, a. The corn¬ 
fields. 6. The birds, c. The fisheries. III. The Discourses—The Sermon 


on the Mount. 1. The city on a hill. 2. The birds and the flowers. 

3. The torrent ........... 409 

IV. Conclusions. 1. Reality of the teaching. 2. Its homeliness and universality. 

3. Its union of human and divine.. . . 423 


CHAPTER XIV.—THE HOLY PLACES. 

L Bethlxhex : Church of Helena—Grotto of the Nativity— Jerome. H. Naza¬ 
reth : Grotto in Latin Convent—Spring near the Greek church—House at 
Loretto —Compared with site at Nazareth— Origin of the Legend. HI. 
Jkrusalex : Lesser localities—Church of the Ascension— Tomb of the 
Virgin—Gethsemane—Coenaeulum—Church of the Holy Sepulchre — Greek 
Easter—Conclusion. 431 


APPENDIX.—VOCABULARY OF HEBREW TOPOGRAPHICAL 

WORDS. 


L—Valleys and Tracts of Land 
II.—Mountains, Hills, and Rocks 
TTT —Rivers and Streams 

IV.—Springs, Wells, and Pits 

V.—Caves .... 

VI.—Forests and Trees 
TTT.—Cities, Habitations . 

VTTT—The Sea and its Shores 


476 

4S7 

493 

500 

505 

506 
510 
518 


INDEX 


521 


















ADVERTISEMENT. 


What is personal in this book may be briefly told. In 
the winter of 1852, and in the spring of 1853, in the 
company of three friends,* to whose kindness I shall 
always feel grateful for having enabled me to fulfil this 
long-cherished design, I visited the well-known scenes 
of Sacred History in Egypt, Arabia, and Syria. Any 
detailed description of this journey has been long since 
rendered superfluous by the ample illustrations of in¬ 
numerable travellers. But its interest and instruction are 
so manifold, that, even after all which has been seen and 
said of it, there still remain points of view unexhausted. 

Much has been written, and still remains to be written, 
both on the History and the Geography of the Chosen 
People. But there have been comparatively few attempts 
to illustrate the relation in which each stands to the other. 
To bring the recollections of my own journey to bear on 
this question,—to point out how much or how little the 
Bible gains by being seen, so to speak, through the eyes 
of the country, or the country by being seen through the 
eyes of the Bible,—to exhibit the effect of the ‘ Holy 

* I trust that I may be permitted to name Mr. Walrond, Mr. Fremantle, 
and Mr. Findlay. 




ADVERTISEMENT. 


viii 


Land ’ on the course of ‘ the Holy History/—seemed to 
be a task not hitherto fully accomplished. To point out 
the limits of this connection will be the object of the 
following Preface. 

As a general rule, it has been my endeavour, on the one 
hand, to omit no geographical feature which throws any 
direct light on the history or the poetry of the sacred 
volume; and, on the other hand, to insert no descriptions 
except those which have such a purpose, and to dwell on 
no passages of Scripture except those which are capable of 
such an illustration. The form of narrative has thus been 
merged in that of dissertation, following the course of 
historical and geographical divisions. Whenever I have 
given extracts from journals or letters, it has been when 
it seemed necessary to retain the impression not merely of 
the scene, but of the moment. Only in a few instances, 
chiefly confined to notes, the main course of the argument 
has been interrupted in order to describe in greater detail 
particular spots, which have not been noticed in previous 
accounts. I have, as much as possible, avoided the con¬ 
troverted points of sacred topography, both because they 
mostly relate to spots which throw no direct light on the 
history, and also because they depend for their solution on 
data which are not yet fully before us. 

The Maps have been framed with the intention of giving 
not merely the physical features, but the actual colouring 
offered to the eye of the traveller at the present time. In 
the use of the geographical terms of the Old and New 
Testament, I have aimed at a greater precision than has 
been reached or perhaps attempted in the Authorised 
Version ; and have thrown into an Appendix a catalogue 
of such words as a help to a not unimportant field of 




ADVERTISEMENT. 


is 


philological and geographical study. For the arrangement 
of this Appendix, as well as for the general verification 
of references and correction of the press I am indebted 
to the careful revision of my friend, Mr. Grove, of 
Sydenham. Throughout the work I have freely used 
all materials within my reach to fill up the deficiencies 
necessarily left by the hasty and imperfect character 
of my personal observation. It is unnecessary to describe 
more particularly the nature of these sources; they are 
mostly given in the long catalogues of writers affixed 
to Robinson’s ‘ Biblical Researches/ and Ritter’s volumes 
on Sinai, Palestine, and Syria; and I may perhaps be 
allowed to refer for a general estimate of their relative 
value to an Essay on ‘ Sacred Geography ’ in the 
Quarterly Review for March, 1854. 

Finally, I have to express my deep sense of all that I 
owe to my friend and fellow-traveller Mr. Theodore 
Walrond, Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford. Without him 
the journey, to which I shall always look back as one of 
the most instructive periods of my life, would in all pro* 
liability never have been accomplished : on his accurate 
observation and sound judgment I have constantly relied, 
both on the spot and since ; and, though I have touched 
too slightly on Egypt to avail myself of his knowledge 
and study of the subject where it would have been most 
valuable, I feel that his kind supervision of the rest 
of the volume gives a strong guarantee for the faithful 
representation of the scenes which we explored together, 
and of the conclusions to be derived from them. 


PREFACE. 


'THE CONNECTION OF SACRED HISTORY AND SACRED GEOGRAPHY. 

The historical interest of Sacred Geography, though 
belonging in various degrees to Mesopotamia, Egypt, 
Asia Minor, Greece, and Italy, is, like the Sacred History 
itself, concentrated on the Peninsula of Sinai and on 
Palestine. Even in its natural aspect the topography of 
these two countries has features which would of themselves 
rivet our attention; and on these, as the basis of all 
further inquiry, and as compared with similar features of 
other parts of the world, I have dwelt at some length. 1 
But to this singular conformation w r e have to add the 
fact that it has been the scene of the most important 
events in the history of mankind; and not only so, but 
that the very fact of this local connection has occasioned a 
reflux of interest, another stage of history, which inter¬ 
mingles itself with the scenes of the older events, thus 
producing a tissue of local associations unrivalled in 
its length and complexity. Greece and Italy have 
geographical charms of a high order. But they have 
never provoked a Crusade; and, however bitter may 


1 See Chapters I. II. VII. and XII. 



PREFACE. 


xi 


have been the disputes of antiquaries about the Acropolis 
of Athens or the Forum of Rome, they have never, as at 
Bethlehem and Jerusalem, become matters of religious 
controversy—grounds for interpreting old prophecies or 
producing new ones—cases for missions of diplomatists, 
or for the war of civilised nations, 

This interest in Sacred Geography, though in some 
respects repelled, yet in some respects is invited by the 
Scriptures themselves. From Genesis to the Apocalypse 
there are—even when not intending, nay, even when 
deprecating, any stress on the local associations of the 
events recorded—constant local allusions, such as are the 
natural result of a faithful, and, as is often the case in 
the Biblical narrative, of a contemporary history. There 
is one document in the Hebrew Scriptures to which pro* 
bably no parallel exists in the topographical records of any 
other ancient nation. In the Book of Joshua we have 
what may without offence be termed the Domesday Book 
of the conquest of Canaan. Ten chapters of that book 
are devoted to a description of the country, in which not 
only are its general features and boundaries carefully laid 
down, but the names and situations of its towns, and 
villages enumerated with a precision of geographical 
terms which invites and almost compels a minute 
investigation. The numerous allusions in the Prophetical 
writings supply what in other countries would be 
furnished by the illustrations of poets and orators. 
The topographical indications of the New Testament, 
it is true, are exceedingly slight; and if it were 
not for the occurrence of the same names in the Old 
Testament or Josephus, it would often be impossible 
to identify them. But what the New Testament loses 


PREFACE. 


by the rarity of its allusions, it gains in their vividness; 
and, moreover, its general history is connected with the 
geography of the scenes on which it was enacted, by a link 
arising directly from the nature of the Christian religion itself. 
That activity and practical energy, which is its chief outward 
characteristic, turns its earliest records into a perpetual 
narrative of journeyings to and fro, by lake and mountain, 
over sea and land, that belongs to the history of no other 
creed. 

It is easy in all countries to exaggerate the points of 
connection between history and geography; and in the 
case of Palestine especially, instances of this exaggera¬ 
tion have sometimes led to an undue depreciation of any 
such auxiliaries to the study of the Sacred History. But 
there are several landmarks which can be clearly defined, 
influence I- The most important results of an insight into the 
national geographical features of any country are those which 

character, elucidate in any degree the general character of the 
nation to which it has furnished a home. If there 
be anything in the course of human affairs which 
brings us near to the ‘ divinity which shapes men’s ends, 
rough-hew them as they will/ which indicates something 
of the prescience of their future course even at its very com¬ 
mencement, it is the sight of that framework in which the 
national character is enclosed, by which it is modified, beyond 
which it cannot develop itself. Such a forecast, as every 
one knows, can be seen in the early growth of the Homan 
commonwealth, and in the peculiar conformation and 
climate of Greece . 1 The question which the geographer of 
the Holy Land, which the historian of the Chosen People 

1 For the sake of convenience I may graphy of Greece,” in the first number 
here refer to an essay on “ The Topo- of the Classical Museum. 


PREFACE. 


has to propose to himself is, ‘ Can such a connection be 
traced between the scenery, the features, the boundaries, 
the situation of Sinai and of Palestine, on the one hand, and 
the history of the Israelites on the other ? * It may be 
that there is much in one part of their history, and little 
in another; least of all in its close, more in the middle 
part, most of all in its early beginnings. But whatever be 
the true answer, it cannot be indifferent to any one who 
wishes—whether from the divine or the human, from the 
theological or the historical point of view—to form a com¬ 
plete estimate of the character of the most remarkable 
nation which has appeared on the earth. If the grandeur 
and solitude of Sinai was a fitting preparation for the 
reception of the Decalogue and for the second birth of an 
infant nation; if Palestine, by its central situation, by its 
separation from the great civilised powers of the Eastern 
world, and by its contrast of scenery and resources both 
with the Desert and with the Egyptian and Mesopotamian 
empires, presents a natural home for the chosen people; if 
its local features are such, as in any way constitute it 
the cradle of a faith that was intended to be universal ,* 
its geography is not without interest, in this its most 
general aspect, both for the philosopher and theologian. 1 

II. Next to the importance of illustrating the general ^ fl f ^.“ ce of 
character of a nation from its geographical situation is the expression, 
importance of ascertaining how far the forms and expres¬ 
sions of its poetry, its philosophy, and its worship, have 
been affected by it. In Greece this was eminently the 
case. Was it so in Palestine? It is not enough to 
answer that the religion of the Jewish people came direct 
from God, and that the poetry of the Jewish prophets and 


See Chapters I, and II. 




XIV 


PREFACE. 


Explana¬ 
tions of 
particular 
events. 


psalmists was the immediate inspiration of God’s Spirit. 
In the highest sense, indeed, of the words this is most 
true. But it must be remembered, that as every one 
acknowledges that this religion and this inspiration came 
through a human medium to men living in those particular 
‘ times ’ of civilisation, and in those particular ‘ bounds of 
habitation/ which God had ‘before appointed’ and 
‘ determined 5 for them, we cannot safely dispense with 
this or with any other means of knowing by what local 
influences the Divine message was of necessity coloured in 
its entrance into the world. 1 Again, as there are some 
who would exaggerate this local influence to the highest, 
and others who would depreciate it to the lowest degree 
possible, it is important to ascertain the real facts, what¬ 
ever they may be, which may determine our judgment in 
arriving at the proper mean. And lastly, as there was in 
the later developments of the history of Palestine, in the 
rabbinical times of the Jewish history, in the monastic and 
crusading times of the Christian history, an abundant 
literature and mythology of purely human growth, it 
becomes a matter of at least a secondary interest to know 
how far the traditions and the institutions of those times 
have been fostered by local considerations. 2 

III. In the two points just noticed the connection 
between history and geography, if real, is essential. But 
this connection must always be more or less matter of 
opinion, and, for that very reason, is more open to fanciful 
speculation on the one side, and entire rejection on the 
other. There is however a connection less important but 
more generally accessible and appreciable, that, namely, 
which, without actually causing or influencing, explains 

j 

1 See Chapters II. and XIII. 2 See Chapters I. II. and XIV. r « 




PREFACE. 


xv 


the events that have occurred in any particular locality. 
The most obvious example of this kind of concatenation 
between place and event is that between a battle and a 
battle-field, a campaign and the seat of war. No one can 
thoroughly understand the one without having seen or 
investigated the other. In some respects this mutual 
relation of action and locality is less remarkable in the 
simple warfare of ancient times than in the complicated 
tactics of modern times. But the course of armies, the 
use of cavalry and chariots, or of infantry, the sudden 
panics and successes of battle, are more easily affected by 
the natural features of a country in earlier than in later 
ages, and accordingly the conquest of Palestine by Joshua 
and the numerous battles in the plain of Esdraelon 1 must 
be as indisputably illustrated by a view of the localities as. 
the fights of Marathon or Thrasymenus. So again 2 the 
boundaries of the different tribes, and the selection of the 
various capitals, must either receive considerable light from 
a consideration of their geographical circumstances, or, if 
not, a further question must arise why in each case such 
exceptions should occur to what is else the well-known and 
general rule which determines such events. It is to the 
middle history of Palestine and of Israel, the times of the 
monarchy, where historical incidents of this kind are 
related in such detail as to present us with their various 
adjuncts, that this interest especially applies. But perhaps 
■ there is no incident of any magnitude, either of the New 
or Old Testament, to which it is not more or less 

1 See Chapters IV. VII. IX. and XI. were so closely blended, it seemed most 
In these portions of the work I have natural not to attempt a separation, 
ventured on a more continuous narra- 2 See Chapters III. IV. Y. VI. VIII. 
'•ive than would elsewhere have been ad- and X. 

Assible. Where history and geography 


PREFACE. 


applicable. Even in those periods and those events which 
are least associated with any special localities, namely the 
ministrations and journeys described in the Gospels and in 
the Acts, it is at least important to know the course of the 
ancient roads, the situation of the towns and villages, 
which must have determined the movements there 
described in one direction or another . 1 
Evidences IV. Those who visit or who describe the scenes of 
of the Sacred history expressly for the sake of finding confirma- 
History. ^ions of Scripture, are often tempted to mislead themselves 
and others by involuntary exaggeration or invention. But 
this danger ought not to prevent us from thankfully wel¬ 
coming any such evidences as can truly be found to the 
faithfulness of the Sacred records. 

One such aid is sometimes sought in the supposed 
fulfilment of the ancient prophecies by the appearance 
which some of the sites of Syrian or Arabian cities present 
to the modern traveller. But as a general rule these 
attempts are only mischievous to the cause which they 
intend to uphold. The present aspect of these sites 
may rather, for the most part, be hailed as a con¬ 
vincing proof that the Spirit of prophecy is not so 
to be bound down. The continuous existence of 
Damascus and Sidon, the existing ruins of Ascalon, Petra, 
and Tyre, showing the revival of those cities long after 
the extinction of the powers which they once represented, 
are standing monuments of a most important truth, namely 
that the warnings delivered by ‘ holy men of old ’ were 
aimed not against stocks and stones, but then, as always, 
against living souls and sins, whether of men or of 
nations . 2 


j See Chapters VI. and XIII. 


3 See Chapters VI. and X. 


PREFACE. 


xvu 


But there is a more satisfactory ‘ evidence 9 to be 
derived from a view of the sacred localities, which has 
hardly been enough regarded by those who have written 
on the subject. Facts, it is said, are stubborn, and 
geographical facts happily the most stubborn of all. We 
cannot wrest them to meet our views; but neither can 
we refuse the conclusions they force upon us. It is by 
more than a figure of speech that natural scenes are 
said to have ‘ witnessed 5 the events which occurred in 
their presence. They are ‘ witnesses 5 which remain 
when the testimony of men and books has perished. 
They can be cross-examined with the alleged facts and 
narratives. If they cannot tell the whole truth, at any 
rate, so far as they have any voice at all, they tell nothing 
but the truth. If a partial advocate like Yolney on one 
side, or Keith on the other, has extorted from them a 
reluctant or partial testimony, they still remain to be 
examined again and again by each succeeding traveller; 
correcting, elucidating, developing the successive depo¬ 
sitions which they have made from age to age. 

It is impossible not to be struck by the constant agree¬ 
ment between the recorded history and the natural 
geography both of the Old and New Testament. To find 
a marked correspondence between the scenes of the 
Sinaitic mountains and the events of the Israelite wander¬ 
ings is not much perhaps, but it is certainly something 
towards a proof of the truth of the whole narrative . 1 To 
meet in the Gospels allusions, transient but yet precise, to 
the localities of Palestine, inevitably suggests the conclu¬ 
sion of their early origin, while Palestine was still familiar 
and accessible, while the events themselves were still 


1 See Chapter I. 


b 


PREFACE. 


xviii 


recent in the minds of the writers . 1 The detailed harmony 
between the life of Joshua and the various scenes of his 
battles , 2 is a slight but true indication that we are dealing 
not with shadows, but with realities of flesh and blood. 
Such coincidences are not usually found in fables, least of 
all in fables of Eastern origin. 

If it is important to find that the poetical imagery 
of the prophetical books is not to be measured by the rules 
of prose, it is not less important to find that the historical 
books do not require the latitude of poetry. Here and 
there, hyperbolical expressions may appear; but, as a 
general rule, their sobriety is evidenced by the actual 
scenes of Palestine, as clearly as that of Thucydides by the 
topography of Greece and Sicily. That the writers of the 
Old and New Testament should have been preserved from 
the extravagant statements made on these subjects by their 
Rabbinical countrymen , 3 or even by Josephus, is, at least, a 
proof of the comparative calmness and elevation of spirit in 
which the Sacred books were composed. The copyists who, 
according to Origen, changed the name of “ Bethabara ” 
into “ Bethania,” or “ Gergesa” into “ Gadara,” because 
they thought only of the names 4 most familiar to their ears, 
without remembering the actual position of the places, 
committed (if so be) the error into which the Evangelists 
were almost sure to have been betrayed had they com¬ 
posed their narratives in the second century, in some city 
of Asia Minor or Egypt. The impossible situations in 

1 See Chapters III. V. X. superficial area of Palestine is 1,440,000 

2 See Chapters IV. VII. XI. English square miles. (Schwarze, p. 30.) 

3 It is said, for example, by Rabbi- In Josephus may be instanced the 
nical authors, that Hebron could be exaggerated descriptions of the preci- 
seen from Jerusalem; that the music pices round Jerusalem. (Ant. XV. ii. 5.) 
of the Temple could be heard at Jericho 4 See Chapters VII. and X. 

(Joma iii. 2, Tainid iii. 2); that the 


PREFACE. 


xix 


numerous instances selected by the inventors of so-called 
traditional sanctuaries or scenes, from the fourth century 
downwards—at Nazareth , 1 at Tabor , 2 on Olivet , 3 at the 
Jordan 4 —are so many testimonies to the authenticity of 
the Evangelical narratives, which have in every case 
avoided the natural snares into which their successors have 
fallen. 

This kind of proof will have a different kind of value in 
the eyes of different persons. To some, the amount of 
testimony thus rendered will appear either superfluous or 
trivial; to others, the mere attempt to define sacred 
history by natural localities and phenomena will seem 
derogatory to their ideal or divine character. But it will, 
at least, be granted that this evidence is, so far as it goes, 
incontestable. Wherever a story, a character, an event, a 
book, is involved in the conditions of a spot or scene still 
in existence, there is an element of fact which no theory or 
interpretation can dissolve. “ If these should hold their 
peace, the stones would immediately cry out.” This testi¬ 
mony may even be more important when it explains, than 
when it refuses to explain, the peculiar characteristics of 
the history. If, for example, the aspect of the ground 
should, in any case, indicate that some of the great wonders 
in the history of the Chosen People were wrought through 
means which, in modern language, would be called natural, 
we must remember that such a discovery is, in fact, an 
indirect proof of the general truth of the narrative. We 
cannot call from the contemporary world of man any 
witnesses to the passage of the Red Sea, or to the over¬ 
throw of the cities of the plain, or to the passage of the 

3 See Chapters III. and XIY. 

4 See Chapter VII. 

b 2 


1 See Chapter X. 

2 See Chapter IX. 


XX 


PREFACE. 


Illustra¬ 
tion of the 
scenes of 
events. 


Jordan. So much the more welcome are any witnesses 
from the world of nature, to testify on the spot to the 
mode in which the events are described to have occurred; 
witnesses the more credible, because their very existence 
was unknown to those by whom the occurrences in 
question were described. Some change may thus be 
needful in our mode of conceiving the events. But we 
shall gain more than we shall lose. Their moral and 
spiritual lessons will remain unaltered: the framework of 
their outward form will receive the only confirmation 
of which the circumstances of the case can now admit. 

V. Even where there is no real connection, either by 
way of cause or explanation, between the localities and 
the events, there remains the charm of more vividly 
realising the scene; if only that we may be sure that we 
have left no stone unturned in our approach to what has 
passed away. Even when, as in the last period of the 
Sacred History, local associations can hardly be supposed 
to have exercised any influence over the minds of the actors, 
or the course of events, it is still an indescribable pleasure 
to know what was the outline of landscape, what the colour 
of the hills and fields, what the special objects, far or near, 
that met the eye of those of whom we read. There is, as 
one of the profoundest historical students of our day 1 well 
observes, a satisfaction in treading the soil and breathing 
the atmosphere of historical persons or events, like that 
which results from familiarity with their actual language 
and with their contemporary chronicles. And this pleasure 
is increased in proportion as the events in question occurred 
not within perishable or perished buildings, but on the 
unchanging scenes of nature; on the Sea of Galilee, and 


Pal grave’s History of Normandy and England, i. 123. 


PREFACE. 


Mount Olivet, and at the foot of Gerizim, rather than in 
the house of Pilate, or the inn of Bethlehem, or the garden 
of the Holy Sepulchre, even were the localities now shown 
as such ever so genuine. 

This interest pervades every stage of the Sacred History, 
from the earliest to the latest times, the earliest, perhaps 
the most, because then the events more frequently occurred 
in connection with the free and open scenery of the 
country, which we still have before us. It is also a 
satisfaction which extends in some measure beyond the 
actual localities of events to those which are merely alleged 
to be such, a consideration not without importance in 
a country where so much is shown of doubtful authenticity, 
yet the objects of centuries of veneration. Such spots 
have become themselves the scenes of a history, though 
not of that history for which they claim attention; and to 
see and understand what it was that has for ages delighted 
the eyes and moved the souls of thousands of mankind is 
instructive, though in a different way from that intended 
by those who selected these sites . 1 

In one respect the sight and description of Eastern 
countries lends itself more than that of any other country 
to this use of historical geography. Doubtless there are 
many alterations, some of considerable importance, in the 
vegetation, the climate, the general aspect of these coun¬ 
tries, since the days of the Old and New Testament . 2 But, 
on the other hand, it is one of the great charms of Eastern 
travelling, that the framework of life, of customs, of 
manners, even of dress and speech, is still substantially 
the same as it was ages ago. Something, of course, in 
representing the scenes of the New Testament, must be 

2 See Chapters I. II. X. 


See Chapter XIV. 


XXII 


PREFACE. 


Poetical 
and pi-o- 
verbial use 
of the geo¬ 
graphy. 


sought from Roman and Grecian usages now extinct; but 
the Bedouin tents are still the faithful reproduction of the 
outward life of the patriarchs—the vineyards, the corn¬ 
fields, the houses, the wells of Syria still retain the out¬ 
ward imagery of the teaching of Christ and the Apostles ; 
and thus the traveller’s mere passing glances at Oriental 
customs, much more the detailed accounts of Lane and of 
Burckhardt, contain a mine of Scriptural illustration which 
it is an unworthy superstition either to despise or to fear . 1 

VI. Finally, there is an interest attaching to sacred geo¬ 
graphy hard to be expressed in words, but which cannot be 
altogether overlooked, and is brought home with especial 
force to the Eastern traveller. It has been well observed 2 
that the poetical events of the Sacred History, so far from 
being an argument against its Divine origin, are striking 
proofs of that universal Providence by which the religion of 
the Bible was adapted to suit, not one class of mind only, 
but many in every age of time. As with the history, so 
also is it with the geography. Not only has the long 
course of ages invested the prospects and scenes of the 
Holy Land with poetical and moral associations, but these 
scenes lend themselves to such parabolical adaptation with 
singular facility. Far more closely as in some respects the 
Greek and Italian geography intertwines itself with the 


1 Although the nature of the work 
has not permitted me to enlarge on 
this source of knowledge, I cannot 
refrain from acknowledging the great 
advantage I derived from the opportu¬ 
nities of constant intercourse with at 
least one genuine Oriental—in the per¬ 
son of our faithful and intelligent Arab 
servant, Mohamed of Ghizeh. 

2 Milman’s History of Christianity, 
vol. i. p. 131. “ This language of poetic 


incident, and, if I may so speak, of 
imagery .... was the vernacular 
tongue of Christianity, universally in¬ 
telligible and responded to by the 
human heart throughout many cen¬ 
turies.The incidents were so 

ordered, that they should thus live in 
the thoughts of men; the revelation 
itself was so adjusted and arranged 
that it might insure its continued 
existence.” 




PREFACE. 


XX111 


history and religion of the two countries; yet when we 
take the proverbs, the apologues, the types, furnished even 
by Parnassus and Helicon, the Capitol and the Rubicon, 
they bear no comparison with the appropriateness of the 
corresponding figures and phrases borrowed from Arabian 
and Syrian topography, even irrespectively of the wider 
diffusion given them by our greater familiarity with the 
Scriptures. The passage of the Red Sea—“the wilder¬ 
ness” of life—the “ Rock of Ages ”—Mount Sinai and its 
terrors—the view from Pisgah—the passage of the Jordan 
—the rock of Zion, and the fountain of Siloa—the lake of 
Gennesareth, with its storms, its waves, and its fishermen, 
are well-known instances in which the local features of the 
Holy Land have naturally become the household imagery 
of Christendom. 

In fact, the whole journey, as it is usually taken by 
modern travellers, presents the course of the history in a 
living parable before us, to which no other journey or 
pilgrimage can present any parallel. In its successive 
scenes, as in a mirror, is faithfully reflected the dramatic 
unity and progress which so remarkably characterises 
the Sacred History. The primeval world of Egypt is 
with us, as with the Israelites, the starting-point—the 
contrast—of all that follows. With us, as with them, the 

t 

Pyramids recede, and the Desert begins, and the wilder¬ 
ness melts into the hills of Palestine, and Jerusalem is 
the climax of the long ascent, and the consummation of 
the Gospel History presents itself locally, no less than 
historically, as the end of the Law and the Prophets. And 
with us, too, as the glory of Palestine fades away into the 
‘ common day’ of Asia Minor and the Bosphorus, gleams 
of the Eastern light still continue—first in the Apostolical 


XXIV 


PREFACE. 


labours, then, fainter and dimmer, in the beginnings of 
ecclesiastical history,—Ephesus, Nicsea, Chalcedon, Con¬ 
stantinople; and the life of European scenery and of 
Western Christendom completes by its contrast what 
Egypt and the East had begun. In regular succession at 
“sundry” and “divers” places, no less than “in sundry 
times and divers manners” “ God spake in times past 
to our fathers;” and the local, as well as the historical 
diversity, is necessary to the ideal richness and complete¬ 
ness of the whole. 

These are the main points, which, in a greater or less 
degree, are brought out in the following pages. One 
observation must be made in conclusion. A work of this 
kind, in which the local description is severed from the 
history, must necessarily bear an incoherent and frag¬ 
mentary aspect. It is the frame without the picture— the 
skeleton without the flesh—the stage without the drama. 
The materials of a knowledge of the East are worthily 
turned to their highest and most fitting use only when 
employed for a complete representation of the Sacred 
History as drawn out in its full proportions from the con¬ 
densed and scattered records of the Scriptures. With¬ 
out in the least degree overloading the narrative with 
illustrations which do not belong to it, there is hardly 
any limit to the legitimate advantage derived by the 
historical and theological student from even such a 
transient glimpse of Eastern life and scenery, as that which 
forms the basis of the present volume. It is not so much 
in express elucidation that this additional power is felt, as 
in the incidental turn of a sentence—in the appreciation 
of the contrast between the East and West, of the atirios- 


PREFACE. 


XXV 


phere, and the character of the people and the country— 
in the new knowledge of expressions, of images, of tones, 
and countenances, which in a merely abstract work like this 
can have no place. So to delineate the outward events of 
the Old and New Testament, as that they should ,come 
home with a new power to those who by long familiarity 
have almost ceased to regard them as historical truth at all 
—so to bring out their inward spirit that the more com¬ 
plete realisation of their outward form should not degrade 
but exalt the faith of which they are the vehicle,—this 
would indeed be an object worthy of all the labour which 
travellers and theologians have ever bestowed on the East. 

The present work is but a humble contribution towards 
this great end. It is an attempt to leave on record, 
however imperfectly, and under necessary disadvantages, 
some at least of the impressions, whilst still fresh in 
the memory, which it seemed ungrateful to allow wholly to 
pass away. Its object will be accomplished, if it brings any 
one with fresh interest to the threshold of the Divine story, 
which has many approaches, as it has many mansions; 
which the more it is explored the more it gives out; which, 
even when seen in close connection with the local associations 
from which its spirit holds most aloof, is still capable of 
imparting to them, and of receiving from them a poetry, a 
life, an instruction, such as has fallen to the lot of no other 
history in the world. 


EGYPT. 










Psalm cxiy. 1 :—Israel came out of Egypt, and the house of Jacob from 
among the strange people. 


EGYPT IN RELATION TO SINAI AND PALESTINE. 

1. First View of the Nile in the Delta.—2. View from the Citadel of Cairo. 
—3. Heliopolis (or On).—4. The Nile Valley.—5. The Tombs of Beni- 
Hassan.—6. The Tombs and the Hermits.—7. Thebes—Colossal 
Statues.—8. Thebes—Karnac and the Royal Tombs.—9. Nile at 
Silsilis.—10. At the first Cataract.— 11 . Philoe.—12. Nile in Nubia.— 
13. Ipsambul.—14. Nile at the second Cataract.—15. Dendera.— 
16. Memphis.—17. The Pyramids. 





INTRODUCTION. 


EGYPT IN ITS RELATION TO SINAI AND PALESTINE. 

Egypt, amongst its many other aspects of interest, has 
this special claim—that it is the background of the whole 
history of the Israelites ; the land to which, next after 
Palestine, their thoughts either by way of contrast or 
association immediately turned. Even in the New Testa¬ 
ment the connection is not wholly severed; and the 
Evangelist emphatically plants in the first page of the 
Gospel History the prophetical text which might well 
stand as the inscription over the entrance to the Old 
Dispensation—“ Out of Egypt have I called my Son.” 
Doubtless some light must be reflected on the national 
feelings of Israel by their Mesopotamian origin; and when 
in the second great exile from the Land of Promise they 
found themselves once more on the shores of the Euphrates, 
it is possible that their original descent from these regions 
quickened their interest in their new settlement, and con¬ 
firmed that attachment to the Babylonian soil which made 
it in later times the chief seat of Jewish life external to 
the boundaries of Palestine. But these points of contact 
with the remote East were too distant from the most 
stirring and the most brilliant epochs of their history 
to produce any definite result. Not so Egypt. The first 
migration of Abraham from Chaldsea is one continued 
advance southward, till he reaches the valley of the Nile; 
and when he reaches it he finds there a kingdom, which 
must have been to the wandering tribes of Asia what the 
Roman empire was to the Celtic and Gothic races when 


xxviii 


INTRODUCTION.. 


they first crossed the Alps. Egypt is to them the land of 
plenty, whilst the neighbouring nations starve; its long 
strip of garden-land was the Oasis of the primitive world; 
through Abraham’s eyes we first see the ancient Pharaoh, 
with palace and harem and princes, and long trains of 
slaves and beasts of burden, so familiar to the traveller in 
the sculptured processions and sacred images of Thebes 
and Ipsambul. What Abraham had begun, was yet 
further carried on by Jacob and Joseph. Whatever may 
have been the relations of this great Israelite migration to 
the dynasty of the Shepherd kings,—there can be no doubt 
that during the period of the settlement in Goshen, Egypt 
became “the Holy Land;” the Israelites to all outward 
appearance became Egyptians; Joseph in his robes of 
white and royal ring—son-in-law of the High Priest of 
On—was incorporated into the reigning caste, as truly as 
any of the figures whom we see in the Theban tombs. 
The sepulchres of Machpelah aud Shechem received, in the 
remains of himself and his father, embalmed Egyptian 
mummies. The shepherds who wandered over the pas¬ 
tures of Goshen were as truly Egyptian Bedouins, as those 
who of old fed their flocks around the Pyramids, or who 
now, since the period of the Mussulman conquest, have 
spread through the whole country. 

As from that long exile or bondage the Exodus was the 
great deliverance, so against the Egyptian worship and 
imagery the history of the Law in Sinai is a perpetual 
protest, though with occasional resemblances which set off 
the greater difference;—against the scenery of Egypt 
all the scenery of the Desert and of Palestine is put in 
continual contrast, though with occasional allusions which 
show that their ancient home was not forgotten. To that 
home, the heart of the people, as at first, so afterwards, 
was always “ turning back.” The reign of Solomon, the 
revival of the Egyptian animal-worship by Jeroboam, the 
leaning on ‘ the broken reed ’ of the Nile in the Egyptian 
alliances of Hezekiah and Jehoiakim, interweave in later 
times the fortunes of the two nations, which else had 
parted for ever on the shores of the Red Sea. And in the 
new Egypt of the Ptolemies arose the second settlement of 


EGYPT. 


XXIX 


the Jews in the same land of Goshen, destined to exercise 
so important an influence on the last and greatest stage 
of their history by the Alexandrian translation of the 
Hebrew Scriptures, and by the Alexandrian forms first of 
Jewish and afterwards of Christian philosophy. 

Egypt, therefore, is a fitting, it may almost be called a 
necessary, prelude to Sinai and Palestine. Even the 
outward features of those countries, in their historical 
connection, cannot be properly appreciated without some 
endeavour to conceive the aspect which the valley of the 
Nile, with its singular imagery and scenery, offered to the 
successive generations of Israel. To give such a picture 
in its full proportions would not be consistent with the 
object or limits of the present work. But, as no view of the 
Holy Land can for the reasons above stated be complete 
without a glance at what may be called its mother coun¬ 
try, I have ventured to throw together a few extracts from 
many letters written on the spot. The fragmentary and 
prefatory form in which they are presented, will best 
explain their purpose, and excuse their superficial character. 
They contain no detailed discussions of Egyptian archaeology 
or geography, but are almost entirely confined to such 
general views of the leading features of the country, in its 
river and its monuments , 1 as will render intelligible any 
subsequent allusions. 

1 For the points of contact between tained in the monuments is the procession 
Egyptian and Israelite history, the reader of Shishak and Ammon with the king of 
is referred to Hengstenberg’s “Egypt Judah amongst the prisoners, on one of 
and the Books of Moses for the general the outer walls of Karnac. It may be 
impression of Egypt on Palestine, to the worth while to mention, that this sculp- 
18th and 19 th chapters of Isaiah, and ture, which is incorrectly given by Cham - 
the 29th, 30th, and 31st of Ezekiel, pollion-Figeac and by Dr. Robinson, is 
with the usual commentaries. The only accurately represented, from Rosellini, 
direct illustration of Jewish history con- in Kenrick’s Egypt, vol. ii. p. 349. 


XXX 


INTRODUCTION. 


1. NILE IN THE DELTA. 

The eastern sky was red with the early dawn; we were on the broad 
waters of the Nile—or rather, its Rosetta branch. The first thing 
which struck me was its size. Greater than the Rhine, Rhone, or 
Danube, one perceives what a sea-like stream it must have appeared 
to Greeks and Italians, who had seen nothing larger than the 
narrow and precarious torrents of their own mountains and valleys. 
As the light broke, its colour gradually revealed itself,—brown like 
the Tiber, only of a darker and richer hue—no strong current, only 
a slow, vast, volume of water, mild and beneficent as his statue in 
the Vatican, steadily flowing on between its two almost uniform 
banks, which rise above it much like the banks of a canal, though in 
some places with terraces or strips of earth, marking the successive 
stages of the flood. 

These banks form the horizon on either side, and therefore you 
can have no notion of the country beyond; but they are varied by 
a succession of eastern scenes—villages of mud, like ant-hills, 
with human beings creeping about, like ants, except in numbers and 
activity—mostly, however, distinguished by the minaret of a well- 
built mosque, or the white oven-like dome of a sheykh's tomb; 
mostly, also, screened by a grove of palms, sometimes intermixed 
with feathery tamarisks, and the thick foliage of the carob-tree or the 
sycomore. Verdure, where it is visible, is light green, but the face 
of the bank is usually brown. Along the top of the banks move, 
like scenes in a magic lantern, and as if cut out against the sky, 
groups of Arabs, with their two or three asses, a camel, or a buffalo. 


2 . VIEW FKOM THE CITADEL OJ? CAIRO. 

The citadel, which stands on a low ridge of rocky hills on the 
east of the town, commands the whole. 

The town is a vast expanse of brown, broken only by occasional 
interludes of palms and sycomores, and by the countless minarets. 
About half a dozen larger buildings, mosques or palaces, also emerge. 
On each side rise shapeless mounds,—those on the east covered with 
tents, and, dimly seen beyond, the browner line of the Desert; those 
on the west, the site of Old Cairo, the site of the Roman fortress of 
Babylon, and of Fostat, where Amrou first pitched his tent,— 
deserted since the time of Saladin. Beyond is the silver line of the 
Nile; and then rising in three successive groups, above the delicate 
green plain which sweeps along nearly to the foot of the African hills, 
the pyramids of Abusir, Sakarah, and Ghizeh, these last being “ The 


EGYPT. 


XXXI 


Pyramids,” and the nearest. There is something very striking in 
their total disconnection with Cairo. They stand alone on the edge 
of that green vale, which is Egypt. There is no intermingling, as 
in ancient and modern Eome. It is as if you looked out on 
Stonehenge from London, or as if the Colosseum stood far away 
in the depths of the Campagna. Cairo is not “ the ghost of the 
dead Egyptian Empire,” nor anything like it. Cairo itself leaves 
a deep feeling that, whatever there was of greatness or wisdom in 
those remote ages and those gigantic monuments, is now the 
inheritance, not of the East, but of the West. The Nile, as it 
glides between the tombs of the Pharaohs and the city of the 
Caliphs, is indeed a boundary between two worlds. 


3. HELIOPOLIS. 

To-day was our first expedition into the real “ Land of Egypt.” 
Through two hours of green fields,—green with corn and clover,— 
avenues of tamarisk, fig-trees, and acacia; along causeways raised 
high above these fields,—that is, above the floods of the summer 
inundations,—we rode to Heliopolis. At every turn there was the 
grateful sound of little rills of living water, worked by water-wheels, 
and falling in gentle murmurs down into these little channels along 
the roadside, whence they fell off into the fields, or the canals. 
The sides of these canals were black with the deep soil of the land 
of Ham. Beyond was the green again, and, close upon that, like 
the sea breaking upon the shore, or (to compare, what is the most 
like it in England, though on a very small scale) the Cornish sand¬ 
hills overhanging the brook of Perranzabuloe, rose the yellow hills of 
the hazy desert. 

At the very extremity of this cultivated ground are the ruins of 
On or Heliopolis. They consist simply of a wide enclosure of 
earthen mounds, partly planted with gardens. In these gardens are 
two vestiges of the great Temple of the Sun, the high-priest of 
which was father-in-law of Joseph, and, in later times, the teacher 
of Moses. 

One is a pool, overhung with willows and aquatic vegetation,— 
the Spring of the Sun. 

The other, now rising wild amidst garden shrubs, the solitary 
obelisk which stood in front of the temple, then in company with 
another, whose base alone now remains. This is the first obelisk 
I have seen standing in its proper place, and there it has stood for 
nearly four thousand years. It is the oldest known in Egypt, and 
therefore in the world,—the father of all that have arisen since. 
It was raised about a century before the coming of Joseph; it 
has looked down on his marriage with Asenath; it has seen the 


xxxn 


INTRODUCTION. 


growth of Moses; it is mentioned by Herodotus; Plato sate under 
its shadow : of all the obelisks which sprang up around it, it alone 
has kept its first position. One by one; it has seen its sons and 
brothers depart to great destinies elsewhere. Prom these gardens 
came the obelisks of the Lateran, of the Vatican, and of the Porta 
del Popolo; and this venerable pillar (for so it looks from a dis¬ 
tance) is now almost the only landmark of the great seat of the 
wisdom of Egypt. 

But I must not forget the view from the walls. Putting out of 
sight the minarets of Cairo in the distance, it was the same that 
Joseph and Moses had as they looked out towards Memphis,—the 
sandy desert; the green fields of Egypt; and, already in their time 
ancient, the Pyramids in the distance. This is the first day that 
has really given me an impression of their size. In this view, the 
two great pyramids stand so close together, that they form one 
bifurcated cone; and this cone does, indeed, look like a solitary 
peak rising over the plain,—like Etna from the sea. On the other 
side, in the yellow desert, seen through the very stems of the palm- 
trees, rise three rugged sand-hills, indicating the site of Leontopolis, 
the City of the Sacred Lions; where in after-times rose the second 
colony and temple of the Jews under Onias. 

One more object I must mention, though of doubtful interest, and 
thus, unlike the certainties that I have just been describing. In a 
garden, immediately outside the walls, is an ancient fig-tree, its 
immense gnarled trunk covered with the names of travellers (in form 
not unlike the sacred Ash of the sources of the Danube), where 
Coptic belief and the tradition of the Apocryphal Gospels fix the 
refuge of Mary and Joseph on the flight into Egypt. There can, of 
course, be no proof, but it reminds us that, for the first time, our 
eyes may have seen the same outline that was seen by our Lord. 


4. THE NILE VALLEY. 

I am now confined within the valley of the Nile—I may say 
literally confined. Never in my life have I travelled continuously 
along a single valley with all the outer world so completely shut off. 
Between two limestone ranges, which form part of the table-land of 
the Arabian and African desert, flows the mighty river, which the 
Egyptians called Hapi-Mu, “the genius of the waters;” which the 
Hebrews called sometimes “ lor,” from some unknown meaning,— 
sometimes “Sihor,” ‘the black/ Its brown colour, seen from" the 
heights on either side and contrasted with the still browner and 
blacker colours of all around it, seems as blue and bright as the 
rivers of the North; hence, some say, the word “Nile,” which is the 
form adopted by the Greeks, and by all the world since. 





















* 


























* 

























































PENINSULA OF SINAI. 


5 


banks, which forms the land of Egypt. The second runs 
almost parallel to this—the bed not of a fertilising 
stream, but of a desolate sea,—the Arabian Gulf of the 
Greeks, the Gulf of Suez in modern geography. The third 
and easternmost cleft at its southern extremity is similar in 
character to the second, and forms the Elanitic Gulf of 
the Greeks, the modern Gulf of 'Akaba ; but further north 
it passes into the deep and wide valley of the ’Arabah, 
which in turn communicates with the still deeper valley 
of the Jordan, running up into the heart of the mountains 
of Lebanon, the original basis from which the whole of 
the system takes its departure. 

It is between those two gulfs, the Gulf of Suez, and the 
Gulf of 'Akaba, that the Peninsula of Sinai lies. From 
them it derives its contact with the sea, and therefore 
with the world; which is one striking distinction between 
it and the rest of the vast desert of which it forms a 
part. From hardly any point in the Sinaitic range is the 
view of the sea wholly excluded; from the highest points 
both of its branches are visible ; its waters, blue with a 
depth of colour more like that of some of the Swiss 
lakes than of our northern or midland seas, its tides 
imparting a life to the dead landscape,—familiar to 
modern travellers from the shores of the Atlantic or 
German ocean; but strange and inexplicable to the 
inhabitants of the ancient world, whose only knowledge 
of the sea was the vast tideless lake which washed 
the coasts of Egypt, Palestine, Greece, and Italy. It 
must have always brought to the mind of those who 
stood on its shores, that they were on the waters of 
a new, and almost unknown, world. Those tides 
come rolling in from the vast Indian Ocean; and with 
the Indian Ocean these two gulfs are the chief channels 
of communication from the Northern world. The 
white shells which strew their shores, the forests of sub¬ 
marine vegetation which gave the whole sea its Hebrew 
appellation of the “ Sea of Weeds,” the trees of coral, 
whose huge trunks may be seen even on the dry shore, 
with the red rocks and red sand, which especially in the 
Gulf of ’Akaba bound its sides,—all bring before us the 


1. The 
Two Gulfs 
of the Red 
Sea. 


XX XIV 


INTRODUCTION. 


Hassan, that is, of the children of Hassan, the wild Arab-tribe once 
settled near the spot. These tombs of Beni-Hassan are amongst 
the oldest monuments of Egypt, during or before the time of Joseph, 
yet exhibiting, in the most lively manner, hunting, wrestling, and 
dancing—and curious as showing how gay and agile these ancient 
people could be, who in their architecture and graver sculptures 
appear so solemn and immoveable. Except a doubtful figure of 
Osiris in one, and a mummy on a barge in another, there is nothing 
of death or judgment or sorrow. 

Every one looks here for the famous procession long supposed to 
be the presentation of Joseph's brethren to Pharaoh. Clearly it 
cannot be this. Besides the difference of numbers, and of gifts, and 
of name, there is no presentation to any one. The procession is in 
one of three compartments; the two lower show the ordinary 
droves of oxen and Egyptian servants, all equally relevant or 
irrelevant to the colossal figure of the owner of the tomb, w T ho stands 
in the corner towering above the rest, with his dog by his side. 
Possibly, as the procession is of Asiatics—and yet not prisoners of 
war—they may, if the date will admit, be a deputation of Israelites 
after their settlement in Goshen. 


6. THE TOMBS AND HERMITS. 

The rocky wall still continues on the eastern side, still called by 
the names of successive Sheykhs or hermits who have lived or died 
on its desert heights—still perforated by the square holes which 
indicate ancient tombs. This eastern range is thus the long ceme¬ 
tery, the Appian Way, the Valley of Jehoshaphat of Egypt. It is, 
indeed, the Land of the Dead. Israel might well ask, “ Because 
there were no graves in Egypt, hast thou brought us to die in the 
wilderness?" The present use of the tombs also brings before us 
how those deserted dwellings of the dead made Egypt the natural 
parent of anchorites and monks. 

In one of these caves, close by the water's edge, lived for 
twelve years Sheykh Hassan, with his wife, two daughters, and his 
son—a hermit, though according to the Mahometan notions which 
permitted him still to have his family about him. Below was a 
little island, which he cultivated for lentiles. The two daughters 
at last married into the village on the opposite shore, which here, 
as usual, spreads out its green plain over against the white cliffs 
of the eastern bank, where the only mark of the fertilising inun¬ 
dation is in the brown discoloration which bears the trace of its rise 
immediately above the river—here alone unprofitable, or profitable 
only to such little portions of soil as the hermit had rescued. 
He still lived on with his wife and the little boy. One day the 



EGYPT. 


XXXV 


child climbed down the rocks to play on the island—a crocodile 
came and carried him off. “ This was four years ago;” and “from 
that time,” said the Arabs, who related the story, “the Sheykh is 
gone—we have seen him no more—he took everything away; and as 
soon as he was gone, the river washed away the island,” and now 
nothing is left but the empty cave. 


7. COLOSSAL STATUES OF THEBES. 

(first visit.) 

No written account has given me an adequate impression of the 
effect, past and present, of the colossal figures of the Kings. What 
spires are to a modern city,—what the towers of a cathedral are to its 
nave and choir,—that the statues of the Pharaohs were to the streets 
and temples of Thebes. The ground is strewed with their fragments : 
there were avenues of them towering high above plain and houses. 
Three of gigantic size still remain. One was the granite statue of 
Kameses himself, who sate on the right side of the entrance to his 
palace. By some extraordinary catastrophe, the statue has been 
thrown down, and the Arabs have scooped their millstones out of his 
face, but you can still see what he was,—the largest statue in the 
world. Ear and wide that enormous head must have been seen, 
eyes, mouth, and ears. Ear and wide you must have seen his vast 
hands resting on his elephantine knees. You sit on his breast and 
look at the Osiride statues which support the portico of the temple, 
and which anywhere else would put to shame even the statues of 
the cherubs iu St. Peter’s—and they seem pigmies before him. His 
arm is thicker than their whole bodies. The only part of the temple 
or palace at all in proportion to him must have been the gateway, 
which rose in pyramidal towers, now broken down, and rolling in 
a wild ruin down to the plain. 

Nothing which now exists in the world can give any notion of what 
the effect must have been when he was erect. Nero towering above 
the Colosseum may have been something like it; but he was of bronze, 
and Bameses was of solid granite. Nero was standing without any 
object; Bameses was resting in awful majesty after the conquest of 
the whole of the then known world. No one who entered that build¬ 
ing, whether it were temple or palace, could have thought of any¬ 
thing else but that stupendous being who thus had raised himself 
up above the whole world of gods and men. 

And when from the statue you descend to the palace, the same 
impression is kept up. It is the earliest instance of the enshrine¬ 
ment in Art of the historical glories of a nation, such as Versailles. 
Everywhere the King is conquering, worshipping, ruling. The Palace 

c 2 


XXXVI 


INTRODUCTION. 

is the Temple—the King is Priest. But everywhere the same colossal 
proportions are preserved. He and his horses are ten times the size of 
the rest of the army. Alike in battle and in worship, he is of 
the same stature as the gods themselves. Most striking is the 
familiar gentleness with which—one on each side—they take him 
by each hand, as one of their own order, and then in the next 
compartment introduce him to Ammon and the lion-headed goddess. 
Every distinction, except of degree, between divinity and royalty, 
is entirely levelled, and the royal majesty is always represented by 
making the King, not like Saul or Agamemnon, from the head and 
shoulders, but from the foot and ankle upwards, higher than the rest 
of the people. 

It carries one back to the days “ when there were giants on the 
earth.” It shows how the King, in that first monarchy, was the 
visible God upon earth. The only thing like it that has since been 
seen is the deification of the Roman emperors. No pure Monotheism 
could for a moment have been compatible with such an intense exal¬ 
tation of the conquering King. “ I am Pharaoh; ” “By the life of 
Pharaoh ; ” “ Say unto Pharoah, Whom art thou like in thy great¬ 
ness ? ” 1 —all these expressions seem to acquire new life from the 
sight of this monster statue. 

And now let us pass to the two others. They are the only statues 
remaining of an avenue of eighteen similar, or nearly similar, statues, 
some of whose remnants lie in the field behind them which led to the 
palace of Amenophis III., every one of the statues being Amenophis 
himself, thus giving in multiplication what Rameses gained in solitary 
elevation. He lived some reigns earlier than Rameses, and the 
statues are of ruder workmanship and coarser stone. To me they 
were much more striking close at hand when their human forms 
were distinctly visible, than at a distance, when they looked only 
like two towers or landmarks. 

The sun was setting; the African range glowed red behind them; 
the green plain was dyed with a deeper green beneath them; and 
the shades of evening veiled the vast rents and fissures in their aged 
frames. They, too, sit, hands on knees, and they too are sixty feet 
high. As I looked back at them in the sunset, and they rose up in 
front of the background of the mountain, they seemed, indeed, as if 
they were part of it,—as if they belonged to some natural creation 
rather than to any work of art. And yet, as I have said, when 
anywhere in their neighbourhood, the human character is never lost. 
Their faces are dreadfully mutilated; indeed, the largest has no face 
at all, but is from the waist upwards a mass of stones or rocks piled 
together in the form of a human head and body. Still, especially 
in that dim light, and from their lofty thrones, they seem to have 
faces, only of hideous and grinning ugliness. 


1 Gen. xli. 44: xlii. 15, 16. Ezek. xxxi. 2. 






EGYPT. 


XXX vu 


And now, who was it that strewed the plain with their countless 
fragments ? Who had power to throw down the Colossus of 
Rameses ? Who broke the statue of Amenophis from the middle 
upwards? Prom the time of the Roman travellers, who have carved 
their names in verses innumerable on the foot of Amenophis, there 
has been but one answer,—Cambyses. He was, in the traditions 
of that time, the Cromwell of Egypt. It is possible that Rameses, 
it is probable that Amenophis, was shattered by earthquakes. But 
the recollection of Cambyses shows the feeling he had left while 
here, as the great Iconoclast. What an effort this implies of fanatical 
or religious zeal! What an impression it gives of that Persian 
hatred of idols, which is described in the Bible, only here carried to 
excess against these majestic kings : "Bel bowetli down, and Nebo 
stoopeth." 1 Well might the idols of Babylon tremble before Cyrus, 
if such was the fate of the Egyptian Pharaohs before Cambyses. 


8. THEBES, KARNAC, AND THE ROYAL TOMBS. 

(second visit.) 

Alone of the cities of Egypt, the situation of Thebes is as 
beautiful by nature as by art. The monotony of the two mountain 
ranges, Libyan and Arabian, for the first time assumes a new and 
varied character. They each retire from the river, forming a circle 
round the wide green plain : the western rising into a bolder and 
more massive barrier, and closing in the plain at its northern 
extremity as by a natural bulwark; the eastern further withdrawn, 
but acting the same part to the view of Thebes as the Argolic 
mountains to the plain of Athens, or the Alban hills to Rome—a 
varied and bolder chain, rising and falling in almost Grecian outline, 
though cast in the conical form which marks the hills of Nubia 
further south, and which, perhaps, suggested the Pyramids. Within 
the circle of those two ranges, thus peculiarly its own, stretches 
the green plain on each side the river to an unusual extent; and on 
each side of the river, in this respect unlike Memphis, but like the 
great city of the further East on the Euphrates,—like the cities of 
northern Europe on their lesser streams—spread the city of Thebes, 
with the Nile for its mighty thoroughfare. " Art thou better than 
‘No-Amon'—that was situated by the ‘rivers of the Nile'—that 
had the waters round about it:—whose rampart was f the sealike 
stream/ and whose wall was the ' sealike stream ? ” 2 

"Thebes" proper, "Taba," the capital—No-Amon (the Hebrew 
name of Thebes) the sanctuary of Ammon—stood on the eastern plain. 
This sanctuary, as founded by Osirtasen in the time of Joseph, as 
restored by the son of Alexander the Great,—still exists, a small 


1 Isa. xlvi. 1. 


2 Nahum iii. 8. 


XXXV111 


INTRODUCTION. 


granite edifice, with the vestiges of the earliest temple round it. 
This is the centre of the vast collection of palaces or temples which, 
from the little Arab village hard by, is called Karnac. 

Imagine a long vista of courts, and gateways, and halls—and 
gateways, and courts, and colonnades, and halls; here and there an 
obelisk shooting up out of the ruins, and interrupting the opening 
view of the forest of columns. Imagine yourself mounted on the 
top of one of these halls or gateways, and looking over the plain 
around. This mass of ruins, some rolled down in avalanches of 
stones, others perfect and painted, as when they were first built, is 
approached on every side by avenues of gateways, as grand as that 
on which you are yourself standing. East and west, and north and 
south, these vast approaches are found,—some are shattered, but in 
every approach some remain; and in some can be traced besides, 
the further avenues, still in part remaining, by hundreds together, 
avenues of ram-headed sphinxes. 

Every Egyptian temple has, or ought to have, one of these great 
gateways formed of^wo ^sloping towers, with the high perpendicular 
front between. But what makes them remarkable at Thebes is 
their numbers, and their multiplied concentration on the one point 
of Karnac. This no doubt is the origin of Homer's expression “The 
City of the Hundred Gatesand in ancient times, even from a dis¬ 
tance, they must have been beautiful. Eor, instead of the brown mass 
of sandstone which they now present, the great sculptures of the gods 
and conquering kings which they uniformly present were painted 
within and without; and in the deep grooves which can still be 
seen, twofold or fourfold, on each side the portal, with enormous holes 
for the transverse beams of support, were placed immense red flag- 
staffs, with Isis-headed standards, red and blue streamers floating 
from them. Close before almost every gateway in this vast array, 
were the granite colossal figures usually of the great Bameses, 
sometimes in white or red marble, of Amenophis and of Thothmes, 
whose fragments still remain. And close by these were pairs of 
towering obelisks (for in Egypt they always stood in pairs), which 
can generally be traced by pedestals on either side, or by the solitary 
twin, mourning for its brother, either lying broken beside it, or far 
away in some northern region at Borne, at Paris, or at Petersburg. 

I have spoken of the view from the top of the great gateway which 
overlooks the whole array of avenues. I must speak also of that 
which from the other end commands the whole series of ruins, each 
succeeding the other in unbroken succession. It is a view something 
of the kind of that up the Eorum from the Colosseum to the Capitol. 
You stand in front of a stately gateway, built by the Ptolemies. 
Immediately in the foreground are two Osiride pillars—their placid 
faces fixed upon you—a strange and striking contrast to the crash 
of temple and tower behind. That crash, however, great as it is, 


EGYPT. 


XXXIX 


has not, like that of the fall of Rome, left mere empty spaces where 
only imagination can supply what once there was. No—there is not 
an inch of this Egyptian Eorum, so to call it, which is not crowded 
with fragments, if not buildings, of the past. No Canina is wanted 
to figure the scene as it once was. You have only to set up again 
the fallen obelisks which lie at your feet; to conceive the columns 
as they are still seen in parts, overspreading the whole; to reproduce 
all the statues, like those which still remain in their august niches; 
to gaze on the painted walls and pillars of the immense hall, which 
even now can never be seen without a thrill of awe,—and you have 
ancient Thebes before you. 

And what a series of history it is! In that long defile of ruins 
every age has borne its part, from Osirtasen I. to the latest Ptolemy, 
from the time of Joseph to the Christian era; through the whole 
period of Jewish history, and of the ancient world, the splendour of 
the earth kept pouring into that space for two thousand years. 

This is the result of the eastern bank: on the western bank can be 
nothing more grand, but there is something more wonderful even 
than Karnak. 

The western barrier of the Theban plain is a mass of high 
limestone cliffs, with two deep gorges : one running up behind the 
plain, and into the very heart of the hills, entirely shut in by them; 
the other running up from the plain, so as to be enclosed within the 
hills, but having its face open to the city. The former is the valley 
of the Tombs of the Kings, the Westminster Abbey of Thebes; 
the latter, of the Tombs of the Priests and Princes, its Canterbury 
Cathedral. 

Ascend, therefore, the first of these two gorges. It is the very 
ideal of desolation. Bare rocks, without a particle of vegetation, 
overhanging and enclosing, in a still narrower and narrower 
embrace, a valley as rocky and bare as themselves, with no human 
habitation visible, the whole stir of the city wholly excluded; such 
is—such always must have been the awful resting-place of the 
Theban kings. 

Nothing that has ever been said about them had prepared me for 
their extraordinary grandeur. You enter a sculptured portal in 
the face of these wild cliffs, and find yourself in a long and lofty 
gallery, opening or narrowing, as the case may be, into successive 
halls and chambers, all of which are covered with white stucco, and 
this white stucco brilliant with colours, fresh as they were thousands 
of years ago, but on a scale, and with a splendour, that I can only 
compare to the frescos of the Vatican Library. 

Some, of course, are more magnificent than the others; but of 
the chief seven all are of this character. They are, in fact, gorgeous 
palaces; hewn out of the rock, and painted with all the decorations 


INTRODUCTION. 


that could have been seen in palaces. No modern galleries or halls 
could be more completely ornamented. But splendid as they 
would be even as palaces, their interest is enhanced tenfold by 
being what they are. There lie “ all the Kings in glory; each 
one in his own house.” (Isa. xiv. 18.) Every Egyptian poten¬ 
tate, but especially every Egyptian king, seems to have begun his 
reign by preparing his sepulchre. It was so in the case of the 
Pyramids, where each successive layer marked the successive years 
of the reign. It w r as so equally in these Theban tombs, where the 
longer or shorter reign can be traced by the extent of the chambers, 
or the completeness of their finish. In one or two instances, you 
pass at once from the most brilliant decorations to rough unhewn 
rock. The king had died, and the grave closed over his imperfect 
work. At the entrance of each tomb, he stands making offerings 
to the Sun, who, with his hawk's head, wishes him a long life to 
complete his labours. 

Two ideas seem to reign through the various sculptures. 

Eirst, the endeavour to reproduce, as far as possible, the life of 
man, so that the mummy of the dead King, whether in his long 
sleep, or on his awakening, might still be encompassed by the old 
familiar objects. Egypt, with all its peculiarities, was to be perpe¬ 
tuated in the depths of the grave; and truly they have succeeded. 
This is what makes this Yalley of Tombs like the galleries of a vast 
Museum. Not the collections of Pompeii at Naples give more 
knowledge of Greek or Koman life than these do of Egyptian. The 
kitchen, the dinners, the boating, the dancing, the trades, all are 
there—all fresh from the hands of the painters of the primeval world. 

The other idea is that of conducting the King to the world 
of death. 

The further you advance into the tomb, the deeper you become 
involved in endless processions of jackal-headed gods, and monstrous 
forms of genii, good and evil; and the Goddess of Justice, with 
her single ostrich feather; and barges, carrying mummies, raised 
aloft over the sacred lake, and mummies themselves; and, more 
than all, everlasting convolutions of serpents in every possible form 
and attitude; human-legged, human-headed, crowned, entwining 
mummies—enwreathing or embraced by processions,—extending 
down whole galleries, so that meeting the head of the serpent at the 
top of a staircase, you have to descend to its very end before you 
reach his tail. At last you arrive at the close of all—the vaulted hall, 
in the centre of which lies the immense granite sarcophagus, which 
ought to contain the body of the King. Here the processions above, 
below, and around, reach their highest pitch—meandering round and 
round—white and black, and red and blue—legs and arms and 
wings spreading in enormous forms over the ceiling; and below 
lies, as I have said, the coffin itself. 


EGYPT. 


xli 


It seems certain that all this gorgeous decoration was, on the 
burial of the King, immediately closed, and meant to be closed for 
ever; so that what we now see was intended never to be seen by 
any mortal eyes except those of the King himself when he awoke 
from his slumbers. Not only was the entrance closed, but in some 
cases—chiefly in that of the great sepulchre of Osirei—the passages 
were cut in the most devious directions, the approaches to them so 
walled up as to give the appearance of a termination long before 
you arrived at the actual chamber, lest by any chance the body of 
the King might be disturbed. And yet in spite of all these pre¬ 
cautions, when these gigantic fortresses have been broken through, 
in no instance has the mummy been discovered. ... . 

Amongst the inscriptions of early travellers is one of peculiar 
interest. It was the “ torch-bearer of the Eleusinian mysteries/' 
who records that he visited these tombs “ many years after the 
divine Plato"—thanks “ to the gods and to the most pious Emperor 
Constantine who afforded him this favour." It is written in the 
vacant space under the figure of a wicked soul returning from the 
presence of Osiris in the form of a pig, which probably arrested the 
attention of the Athenian by reminding him of his own mysteries. 
Such a confluence of religions—of various religious associations— 
could hardly be elsewhere found; a Greek priest-philosopher recording 
his admiration of the Egyptian worship in the time of Constantine, 
on the eve of the abolition of both Greek and Egyptian religion 
by Christianity. 

It was on the evening of our last day that w r e climbed the steep 
side of that grand and mysterious valley, and from the top of the 
ridge had the last view of the valley itself, as we looked back upon 
it, and of the glorious plain of Thebes as we looked forward 
over it. 

No distant prospect of the ruins can ever do them justice; but 
it was a noble point from which to see once more the dim masses 
of stone rising here and there out of the rich green, and to know 
' that this was Karnac with its gateways, and that Luxor with its long 
colonnade, and those nearer fragments the liamaseum and Medinet- 
Habou; and further, the wide green depression in the soil, once the 
funereal lake. 

Immediately below lay the Yalley of Assasif, w'here in a deep 
recess under towering crags, like those of Delphi, lay the tombs of 
the priests and princes. The largest of these, in extent the largest 
of any, is that of Petumenap, Chief Priest in the reign of Pharaoh 
Neco. Its winding galleries are covered with hieroglyphics, as if 
hung with tapestry. The only figures which it contains are those 
which appear again and again in these priestly tombs, the touching 
effigies of himself and his wife—the best image that can be carried 
away of Joseph and Asenath—sitting side by side, their arms 




INTRODUCTION. 


xlii 


affectionately and solemnly entwined round each other's necks. . . . 
To have seen the Tombs of Thebes is to have seen the Egyptians as 
they lived and moved before the eyes of Moses—is to have seen the 
utmost display of funereal grandeur which has ever possessed the 
human mind. To have seen the Royal Tombs is more than this— 
it is to have seen the whole religion of Egypt unfolded as it appeared 
to the greatest powers of Egypt, at the most solemn moments of 
their lives. And this can be explored only on the spot. Only a very 
small portion of the mythological pictures of the Tombs of the 
Kings has ever been represented in engravings. The mythology of 
Egypt, even now, strange to say, can be studied only in the caverns 
of the Yalley of the Kings. 


9. NILE AT SILSILIS. 

At Silsilis, the seat of the ancient sandstone quarries—there was 
a scene which stood alone in the voyage. The two ranges, here 
of red sandstone, closed in upon the Nile, like the Drachenfels 
and Rolandseck; fantastic rockery, deep sand-drifts, tombs and 
temples hewn out of the stone, the cultivated land literally reduced 
to a few feet or patches of rush and grass. It was curious to 
reflect, that those patches of green were for the time the whole of 
the Land of Egypt,—we ourselves, as we swept by in our boat, the 
whole living population contained within its eastern and western 
boundaries. It soon opened again, wide plains appearing on each 
side. 

10. NILE AT THE FIRST CATARACT. 

And now the narrow limits of the sandstone range, which had 
succeeded to our old friends of limestone, and from which were dug 
the materials of almost all the temples of Egypt, are exchanged 
at Assouan—the old Syene—for the granite range; the Syenite 
granite, from which the Nile issues out of the mountains of Nubia. 

Eor the first time a serrated mass of hills ran, not as heretofore 
along the banks, but across the southern horizon itself. The broad 
stream of the river, too, was broken up, not as heretofore by flat 
sandbanks, but by fantastic masses of black porphyry and granite, 
-and by high rocky islands, towering high above the shores. Ear 
and wide these fantastic rocks are strewn, far into the eastern Desert, 
far up the course of the Nile itself. 

These are the rocks which make, and are made by, the Cataract. 
These, too, furnish the quarries from whence came the great colossal 
statues of Raineses, and all the obelisks. Erom this wild and 
distant region sprang all those familiar forms which we know so 


EGYPT. 


xliii 


well in the squares of Rome. In the quarries which are still visible 
in the white sands and black crags immediately east of Assouan, 
one obelisk still remains, hewn out, but never removed from his 
original birthplace; the latest, as that of Heliopolis is the earliest 
born of the race. And not only are these rocks the quarries of the 
statues, but it is hardly possible to look at their forms and not 
believe that they suggested the idea. Islands, quarries, crags along 
the river-side, all seem either like grotesque colossal figures, sitting 
with their grim features carved out against the sky, their vast limbs 
often smoothed by the inundations of successive ages; or else like 
the same statues broken to shivers, like that we saw at Thebes. 
One can quite imagine how, in the days when power was will and 
will was power, Rameses, returning from his Ethiopian conquests, 
should say, “ Here is the stone, hard and glittering, from which 
my statue shall be hewn, and here is the model after which it shall 
be fashioned.” 

This is the utmost limit of the journey of Herodotus. He had 
been told a strange story, which he says he could not believe, by the 
Treasurer at Sais, that at this point of the river there were two 
mountains running up into sharp peaks, and called Crophi and 
Mophi, between which were the sources of the Nile, from which it 
ran down northwards, on one side, into Egypt, and southwards, on 
the other, into Ethiopia. He came, he says, to verify it, and observes 
(doubtless with truth), that by those deep, unfathomable sources 
which they described, they meant the violent eddies of the Cataracts. 
To an inhabitant of Lower Egypt, the sight or the report of such 
a convulsion as the rapids make in the face of their calm and 
majestic river, must have seemed like the very beginning of his 
existence, the struggling into life of what afterwards became so mild 
and beneficial. And if they heard that there was a river Nile 
further south, it was then natural for them to think that this could 
not be the same as their own. The granite range of Syene was to 
them their Alps—the water-shed of their world. If there was a 
stream on the other side, doubtless it flowed far away into the 
Ocean of the South. And these fantastic peaks, not two only, but 
hundreds, were simplified by them into Crophi and Mophi—the 
names exactly suit the wild mysterious character of the whole 
scenery which they represent. 

And now it is immediately above the roar of these rapids— 
but still in the very centre of these colossal rockeries—that you 
emerge into sight of an island lying in the windings of the river— 
fringed with palms, and crowned with a long line of temples and 
colonnades. This is Pliilse. 


xliv 


INTRODUCTION. 


11. PHIL.E. 

The name expresses its situation—it is said to be “Pilek,” “the 
frontier” between Egypt and Ethiopia, and the name seems to have 
been applied to all the larger islands in this little archipelago. One 
of these (Biggeh) immediately overhangs Philae, and is the most 
remarkable of all the multitude for its fantastic shapes. High from 
its black top, you overlook what seems an endless crater of these 
porphyry and granite blocks, many of them carved with ancient 
figures and hieroglyphics; in the silver lake which they enclose lies 
Philse, the only flat island amongst them. Its situation is more 
curious than beautiful, and the same is true of its temples. As 
seen from the river or the rocks, their brown sandstone colour, 
their dead walls hardly emerge sufficiently from the sand and 
mud cottages which enclose them round, and the palms are not 
sufficiently numerous to relieve the bare and mean appearance 
which the rest of the island presents. As seen from within, how¬ 
ever, the glimpses of the river, the rocky knolls, and the feathery 
tresses of the palm, through the vista, the massive walls and colonnades 
irregular and perverse in all their proportions, but still grand from 
their size, are in the highest degree peculiar. Foreground—distance 
—Art and nature are here quite unique; the rocks and river (of 
which you might see the like elsewhere) are wholly unlike Egypt, as 
the square towers, the devious perspective, and the sculptured walls, 
are wholly unlike anything else except Egypt. 

The whole Temple is so modern, that it no way illustrates, except 
so far as it copies them, the feelings of the religion of the old 
Egyptians. The earliest, and the only Egyptian, name that occurs 
upon it, is Nectanebo, an Egyptian prince, who revolted against the 
later Persian kings. All the rest are the Grecian Ptolemies, and 
of these the chief is Ptolemy Physcon, or the Fat, so called because 
he became so bloated by his luxurious living that he measured six 
feet round, and who proposed, but in vain, to Cornelia, mother 
of the Gracchi. But in this very fact of its modern origin there is 
a peculiar interest. It is the fullest specimen of the restoration of 
the old Egyptian worship by the Ptolemies, and of an attempt, like 
ours, in Gothic architecture, to revive a style and forms which had 
belonged to ages far away. The Ptolemies here, as in many other 
places, were trying “ to throw themselves ” into Egyptian worship, 
following in the steps of Alexander “ the son of Ammon.” In 
many ways this appears. First, there is much for show without 
real use—one great side chapel, perhaps the finest of the group, built 
for the sake of its terrace towards the river—the main entrance to 
the Temple being in fact no entrance at all. Then there is the 
want of symmetry which alw r ays more or less distinguishes the 


EGYPT. 


xlv 


Egyptian architecture, but is here carried to a ridiculous excess. 
No perspective is carried consistently through: the sides of the 
same courts are of different styles: no one gateway is in the same 
line with another. Lastly there is the curious sight of sculptures, 
contemporary with the finest works of Greek Art, and carved under 
Grecian kings, as rude and coarse as those under the earliest Pharaohs, 
to be “ in keeping” with Egyptian architecture, and to “ preserve 
the ancient type,” like the mediaeval figures in painted windows and 
the illegible inscriptions round the arches of some modern English 
churches. And not only are the forms but the subjects imitated, 
long after all meaning had passed away, and this not only in the 
religious figures of Isis and the gods. There is something ludicrously 
grotesque in colossal bas-reliefs of kings seizing innumerable captives 
by the hair of their head, as in the ancient sculptures of Rameses— 
kings who reigned at a time when all conquests had ceased, and who 
had, perhaps, never stirred out of the palaces and libraries of 
Alexandria. 

The mythological interest of the Temple is its connection with 
Isis, who is its chief divinity, and accordingly the sculptures of her, 
of Osiris, and of Horus, are countless. The most remarkable, though 
in a very obscure room, and on a very small scale, is the one repre¬ 
senting the death of Osiris, and then his embalment, burial, gradual 
restoration, and enthronement as judge of the dead. But this legend 
belongs, like the rest of the Temple, to the later, not the ancient 
stage of Egyptian belief. 


12. NILE IN NUBIA. 

We are still on the Nile, but it is no longer the Nile of Egypt. 
The two ranges are wild granite and sandstone hills, which 
enclose the river so completely, and render the banks so high and 
steep, that there is no general cultivation. The waters rise to a 
certain height up the terraced shore, and accordingly here, as to 
a certain extent in Upper Egypt, you see the springing corn and 
vegetation to the very edge of the stream. But beyond that the 
water can only be raised by water-wheels worked by oxen, which 
accordingly are here ten times as numerous as in Egypt, working by 
night and day, and—as all the grease in the country is used in 
plastering the long hair of the unturbaned heads of the Nubians— 
creaking by night and day, and all along the river, with a sound 
which in the distance is like the hum of a mosquito. How much 
that hum tells you of the state of the country if you inquire into 
all its causes ! The high banks which prevent the floods, the 
tropical heats which call for the labour of oxen instead of men, 
the constant need of water, and the wild costume of the people. 


INTRODUCTION. 


Another feature of the country is, that you feel you are now 
beyond the reach of history. This is Ethiopia, and from this 
possibly the Egyptian race may have sprung; and there is no 
doubt that the great Pharaohs, and afterwards the Caesars, pushed 
their conquests over it far south. But it was, after all, a pro¬ 
vince without any national existence of its own, and accordingly 
of all the towns and temples we shall pass there is not one of the 
slightest historical interest—not the villages in the wilds of 
Australia or America can be less known or less important than these. 
Their sole interest is, that they assist you in filling up the broken 
outlines and vacant spaces of Thebes and Memphis; and the very 
fact of their remoteness from the course of history conduces to this 
result, because this remoteness has preserved them, whilst the monu¬ 
ments of the better frequented country below the Cataract have 
perished. Already we have passed as many temples in one day, as 
we passed (with the exception of Thebes) during the whole of the 
rest of our Egyptian voyage. There they stand, broken and of 
various ages, but massive and striking on the river-side, taking the 
place of the tombs of Egypt, and of the castles on the Rhine and 
Danube. .... 

Further on we see clusters of deep purple hills rising, not in con¬ 
tinuous chains, but east, and west, and north and south; purple, not 
with the amethyst of the Apennines, but with a black porphyry hue, 
that contrasts strangely with the bright green strip which lies at 
their feet, or else with the drifts of sand, sometimes the gray dust 
of the Nile alluvium, oftener the yellow sand of the Desert, which 
now appears far oftener than in Egypt. 

You feel here the force of that peculiar attribute of the Nile—his 
having no tributaries. After having advanced 800 miles up his 
course, you naturally expect, as in the Rhine, that when you have 
tracked him up into his mountain-bed, and are approaching, how¬ 
ever indefinitely, to his veiled sources, you will find the vast volume 
of waters shrink. But no—the breadth and strength below was all 
his own; and throughout that long descent he has not a drop of water 
but what he brought himself, and therefore you have the strange 
sight of a majestic river flowing like an arm of the sea in the 
Highlands, as calm and as broad amongst these wild Nubian hills as 
in the plain of Egypt. 


13. IPSAMBUL (OR ABOU-SIMBIL). 

Why the great Temple of Ipsambul should have been fixed at 
this spot, it is hard to say. Perhaps because, after this point, begins 
the more strictly Desert-part of Nubia, known by the name of the 
“ Belly of Stone; ” and thus, for a long way further south, on the 



EGYPT. 


western bank (to which all the Nubian temples, but two, are con¬ 
fined), there are no masses of rock out of which such a monument 
could be hewn. The great temple is in the bowels of a hill, obliquely 
facing eastwards, and separated from the smaller Temple, which 
immediately overhangs the river, by the avalanche of sand which, 
for centuries, had entirely buried the entrance, and now chokes up 
its greater part. 

There are two points which give it an essential and special interest. 
First, you here get the most distinct conception of the great 
Rameses. Sculptures of his life you can see elsewhere. But here 
alone, as you sit on the deep pure sand, you can look at his fea¬ 
tures inch by inch, see them not only magnified to tenfold their 
original size, so that ear and mouth, and nose, and every link of his 
collar, and every line of bis skin, sinks into you with the weight of a 
mountain; but these features are repeated exactly the same, three times 
over—four times they once were, but the upper part of the fourth 
statue is gone. Kehama is the image which most nearly answers 
to these colossal kings: and this multiplication of himself—not one 
Rameses but four—is exactly Kehama entering the eight gates of 
Padalon by eight roads at once. Look at them, as they emerge,— 
the two northern figures, from the sand which reaches up to 
their throats—the southernmost, as he sits unbroken, and revealed 
from the top of his royal helmet to the toe of his enormous 
foot. Look at them, and remember that the face which looks 
out from the top of that gigantic statue is the face of the greatest 
man of the Old World that preceded the birth of Greece and Rome 
—the first conqueror recorded in history—the glory of Egypt 
—the terror of Africa and Asia—whose monuments still remain in 
Syria and in Asia Minor—the second founder of Thebes, which 
must have been to the world then, as Rome was in the days of its 
Empire. It is certainly an individual likeness. Three peculiarities 
I carry away with me, besides that of profound repose and tran¬ 
quillity, united, perhaps, with something of scorn—first, the length 
of the face, compared with that of most others that one sees in the 
sculptures; secondly, the curl of the tip of the nose; thirdly, the 
overlapping and fall of the under lip. 

One of the two southern colossal figures, I said, was shattered 
from the legs upwards; but the legs are happily preserved, and on 
them, as on the Amenophis at Thebes, are the scrawls, not of 
modern travellers—nor even as at Thebes, of Roman pilgrims— 
but of the very earliest Greek adventurers who penetrated into 
Africa. Some of them are still visible. The most curious, how¬ 
ever, has been again buried in the accumulation of sand. It is 
the oldest Greek inscription in the world,—by a Greek soldier who 
came here to pursue some deserters in the last days of the Egyptian 
monarchy. 


INTRODUCTION. 


And now let us pass to the second great interest of Ipsambul, 
which is this. Every other great Egyptian temple is more or less 
in ruins. This, from being hewn out of the rock, is in all its 
arrangements as perfect now as it was when it was left unfinished 
by Rameses himself. 

You can explore every chamber from end to end, and you know 
that you have seen them all. The fact of its being a cave, and not 
a building, may of course have modified the forms. But the 
general plan must have been the same, and the massive shapes, the 
low roofs, the vast surface of dead wall, must have been suggested 
in the temples of Lower Egypt, where these features were not 
necessary, by those in Ethiopia where they were. 

The temple is dedicated to Ra or the Sun. This is represented 
in a large bas-relief over the great entrance between the colossal 
figures. There is Rameses presenting offerings to the Sun, whom 
you recognise at once here and elsewhere by his hawk's head. 
This in itself gives the whole place a double interest. Not 

only was the Sun the especial deity of the Pharaohs, which means 

Children of the Sun," but he was the god of Heliopolis, and 
such as we see him here,—and such in great measure as his 

worship was here, such was he and his worship in the great 

Temple of Heliopolis, now destroyed,—from which came the 
obelisks of Europe,—of which Joseph's father-in-law was High 
Priest, and where Moses must most frequently have seen the 
Egyptian ceremonies. 

Now climb up that ridge of sand, stoop under the lintel of the 
once gigantic doorway, between which and the sand there is left 
only an aperture of a few feet, and dive into the dark abyss of the 
Temple itself. Dark it must always have been, though not so dark 
as now. All the light that it had came through that one door. 
Eirst, there is the large hall, with four pillars ranged on each side, 
colossal figures of Osiris; each figure with the feet swathed, the hands 
crossed on the breast, the crook and knotted scourge—his universal 
emblems—clasped in them; the face absolutely passionless; broad, 
placid, and serene as the full Nile; the highest ideal of repose, 
both as the likeness of Death in the mummy, and as the representa¬ 
tive of the final Judgment. From this hall, richly sculptured round 
with the Homeric glories of Rameses, we pass into another filled 
with sculptures of gods. We have left the haunts of man and are 
advancing into the presence of the Divinities. Another corridor, 
and the Temple narrows yet again, and we are in the innermost 

sanctuary.In that square rocky chamber, to which we are 

thus brought by the arms of the mountain closing us in with a 
closer and ever closer embrace, stood, and still stands, though 
broken, the original altar. Behind the altar, seated against the 
rocky wall, their hands upon their knees, looking straight out 



EGYPT. 


lxix 


through the door of the sanctuary, through the corridor, through 
the second hall, and through the first, to the small aperture of day¬ 
light and blue sky, as it is now,—to the majestic portal as it was in 
ancient times,—sate, and still sit, the four great gods of the Temple. 
There they sate and looked out; and as you stand far back in the 
Temple, and light up the Adytum by kindling fires once more on 
that forgotten altar, you can see them still. 

There is the Hawkhead of the Sun. Next to him, Rameses 
himself; next, Ammon, the Jupiter of Egypt—the great god 
of Thebes—you see his tall cap, or tiara, towering high above 
the head of all the others in strong relief against the wall;—and 
in the remaining corner Kneph with the ram's head, the Spirit 
of the Universe. As the whole Temple has contracted in pro¬ 
portion to its receding inwards, so also have the statues in 
size. The sculptures of the Adytum, on each side, represent the 
processions of the Sacred Boat, floating to its extremity. There 
is no trace of habitation for the sacred Hawk, who if he were 
in the Temple must have been here, sitting at the feet of Ra. 
So at least it follows from Strabo's clear account, that in the 
Adytum of every Egyptian temple the Sacred animal was kept, 
whatever it might be, corresponding to the statue of the Greek 
and Roman sanctuary,—to the no-statue of the Holy of Holies in 
the Jewish temple. 

The chief thought that strikes one at Ipsambul, and elsewhere, is 
the rapidity of transition in the Egyptian worship, from the sublime 
to the ridiculous. The gods alternate between the majesty of ante- 
Diluvian angels, and the grotesqueness of pre-Adamite monsters. By 
what strange contradiction could the same sculptors and worshippers 
have conceived the grave and awful forms of Ammon and Osiris, 
and the ludicrous images of gods in all shapes, “in the heavens, 
and in the earth, and in the waters under the earth," with 
heads of hawk and crocodile, and jackal and ape? What must 
have been the mind and muscles of a nation who could worship, 
as at Thebes, in the assemblage of hundreds of colossal Pashts (the 
Sacred Cats) ? And, again, how extraordinary the contrast of the 
serenity and the savageness of the kings ! Rameses, with the placid 
smile, grasping the shrieking captives by the hair, as the. frontispiece 
of every temple; and Ammon, with the smile no less placid, giving 
him the falchion to smite them. The whole impression is that 
gods and men alike belong to an age and world entirely passed 
away, when men were slow to move, slow to think, but when they 
did move or think, their work was done with the force and violence 
of Giants. 

One emblem there is of true Monotheism,—everywhere a thousand 
times repeated,—always impressive, and always beautiful,—chiefly 
on the roof and cornice, like the Cherubim in the Holy of Holies,— 

* » d 


1 


INTRODUCTION. 


the globe, with its wide-spread wings of azure blue, of the all- 
embracing sky: " Under the shadow of thy wings shall be my 
refuge.” 


14. THE NILE BEFORE THE SECOND CATARACT. 

The great peculiarity of this last stage of Nubia is, that whereas 
in Egypt the Nile flowed through its limestone ranges, in Lower 
Nubia through" its wild mountain-passes, so here, in Upper Nubia, 
it flows through an absolute Desert. Erom the high sandstone rock 
of Abou-Sir, that last monument of English travellers, you look 
over a wide expanse of sand, broken only by the sight of the turbid 
river which dashes below through innumerable islets of what look 
exactly like black, bristling coal. This wide expanse ends, or ended, 
on the day when I saw it, in clouds of sand, such as overwhelmed 
the host of Cambyses, and which rose high in the heavens, like a 
thick November fog, the sun glaring with a sickly orb above, and his 
rays streaming through the mist below, like the rain of northern 
regions. Sand is, as I have said before, the snow of these southern 
regions ; it is also its water, for rightly did the Prophet enjoin his 
followers to use its fine and pure streams for their ablutions when 
water failed; it is also, as I saw on this day, its mist, its rain, its 
fog. In the dim distance rose the two isolated mountains on the 
southern horizon, which mark the way to Dongola. The Second 
Cataract is, geographically speaking and historically, of but little 
significance in the Talley of the Nile : it stops the navigation, that 
is all: the Desert has begun before, and continues afterwards. 

One feature of the Nile I must here add to what I have already 
said. Every one knows that the only mode of communication is the 
river; but the voyage up the Nile requires and possesses the consent 
of another power besides that of the stream; namely the wind. It is 
a remarkable provision that the north wind which blows for nine 
months in the year, and especially during the floods when the stream 
is strongest, acts as a corrective to enable navigation upwards when 
else it would be impossible. Hence the plausibility of that con¬ 
jecture mentioned by Herodotus about the "yearly winds.” So 
fixed, so regular a part of the economy of the river do they form, 
that it was natural to imagine that they actually prevented the 
waters of the river from entering the sea. And thus when we look 
at the boats with their white sails scudding before the breeze along 
the broad stream, we see how Egypt and Ethiopia might be fitly 
called " a land shadowing with wings.” 1 


1 Isa. xviii. 1. (Ewald.) 



EGYPT. 


li 


15. DENDERA. 1 

Dendera is tlie only perfect Temple left besides those in Nubia— 
that is, the only one perfect, not as an excavation from the rock, but 
as a building. But its interest is like Philse, not from its antiquity, 
but its novelty. Its oldest portion was built by Cleopatra; its finest 
part by Tiberius. Here, as at Hermonthis, is yet to be seen that 
famous form and face. She is here sculptured in colossal propor¬ 
tions, so that the fat full features are well brought out, and, being 
like those at Hermonthis, give the impression that it must be a 
likeness. Immediately before her stands, equally colossal and with 
the royal crown of Egypt, her son, by Caesar. 

These must be the latest sculptures of the independent sovereigns 
of Egypt. The interior is filled with the usual ovals for the names 
of kings—now blank—for before Cleopatra had time to fill them 
Actium was fought, and Egypt had passed into the hands of Eome, 
and accordingly the splendid portico is the work of Tiberius. It is 
in these great porticoes that you trace the real spirit of Eoman 
architecture in Egypt. The interior of the Temple, though very 
large, is but a tedious and commonplace copy of the most formal 
plan of an old temple; but the portico has something of its own, 
which is only seen here and in the corresponding portico at Esneh, 
and of which the whole effect, though on a gigantic scale and with 
curious capitals of human faces, is like that of the colonnade in 
front of the Pantheon. 


16. MEMPHIS. 

Memphis was the second capital of Egypt—sometimes the first— 
and there the Pharaohs lived at the time of the Exodus; and( 
there, if its monuments had remained, might have been found the 
traces of the Israelites, which we seek in vain elsewhere. Histori¬ 
cally and religiously it ought to be as interesting as Thebes. Yet 
Thebes still remains quite unrivalled. There was never anything 
at Memphis like that glorious circle of hills—there is now nothing 
like those glorious ruins. Still it is a striking place. Imagine 
a wide green plain, greener than anything else I have seen in Egypt. 
A vast succession of palm-groves, almost like the Eavenna pine- 
forest in extent, runs along the river-side, springing in many spots 
from green turf. Behind these palm-forests—behind the plain— 
rises the white back of the African range; and behind that again, 
“ even as the hills stand round about Jerusalem,” so stand the 

1 These three last letters are, for convenience of their contents, arranged not in 
order of place, hut of time. 






lii 


INTRODUCTION. 


Pyramids round about Memphis. These are to Memphis as the 
Royal tombs to Thebes, that is, the sepulchres of the Kings of Lower, 
as those of Upper, Egypt. And such as the view now is, such it 
must have been as far back as history extends. They are not actually 
as old as the hills, but they are the oldest monuments of Egypt and 
of the world, and such as we see them in that distant outline, each 
group rising at successive intervals—Dashur, Sakara, Abou-Sir 
and Ghizeh—such they seemed to Moses, to Joseph, perhaps to 
Abraham. They are the sepulchres of the kings, and in the sand¬ 
hills at their feet are the sepulchres of the ordinary inhabitants of 
Memphis. 

Eor miles you walk through layers of bones and skulls and 
mummy swathings, extending from the sand, or deep down in shaft¬ 
like mummy-pits; and amongst these mummy-pits are vast galleries 
filled with mummies of Ibises, in red jars, once filled, but now 
gradually despoiled. And lastly—only discovered recently—are 
long galleries hewn in the rock, and opening from time to time— 
say every fifty yards—into high arched vaults, under each of which 
reposes the most magnificent black marble sarcophagus that can be 
conceived—a chamber rather than a coffin—smooth and sculptured 
within and without; grander by far than even the granite sarco¬ 
phagi of the Theban kings—how much grander than any human 
sepulchres anywhere else. And all for the successive corpses of the 
bull Apis! These galleries formed part of the great temple of 
Serapis, in which the Apis mummies were deposited; and here 
they lay, not in royal, but in divine state. The walls of the 
entrances are covered with ex-votos. In one porch there is a 
painting at full length, black and white, of the Bull himself as he 
was in life. 

One other trace remains of the old Memphis. It had its own 
great temple, as magnificent as that of Ammon at Karnac, dedicated 
to the Egyptian Vulcan, Pthah. Of this not a vestige remains. 
But Herodotus describes that Sesostris, that is Rameses, built a 
colossal statue of himself in front of the great gateway. And there 
accordingly—as it is usually seen by travellers, is the last me¬ 
morial of that wonderful King, which they bear away in their 
recollections of Egypt. Deep in the forest of palms, before de¬ 
scribed, in a little pool of water left by the inundations, which 
year by year always cover the spot, lies a gigantic trunk, its back 
upwards. The name of Rameses is on the belt. The face lies 
downwards, but is visible in profile and quite perfect, and the very 
same as at Ipsambul, with the only exception that the features 
are more feminine and more beautiful, and the peculiar hang of the 
lip is not there. 



EGYPT. 


liii 


17. THE PYRAMIDS. 

The approach to the Pyramids is first a rich green plain, and 
then the Desert—that is, they are just at the beginning of the Desert, 
on a ridge, which of itself gives them a lift above the Yalley of the 
Nile. It is impossible not to feel a thrill as one finds oneself 
drawing nearer to the greatest and the most ancient monuments in 
the world, to see them coming out stone by stone into view, and 
the dark head of the Sphinx peering over the lower sandhills. Yet 
the usual accounts are correct which represent this nearer sight as 
not impressive—their size diminishes, and the clearness with which 
you see their several stones strips them of their awful or mysterious 
character. It is not till you are close under the great Pyramid, 
and look up at the huge blocks rising above you into the sky, that 
the consciousness is forced upon you that this is the nearest approach 
to a mountain that the art of man has produced. 

The view from the top has the same vivid contrast of Life and 
Death which makes all wide views in Egypt striking—the Desert 
and the green plain; only here, the view over the Desert—the African 
Desert—being much more extensive than elsewhere, one gathers 
in better the notion of the wide heaving ocean of sandy billows 
which hovers on the edge of the Yalley of the Nile. The white 
line of the minarets of Cairo is also a peculiar feature—peculiar, 
because it is strange to see a modern Egyptian city which is a 
grace instead of a deformity to the view. You also see the strip 
of Desert running into the green plain on the east of the Nile, 
which marks Heliopolis and Goshen. 

The strangest feature in the view is the platform on which 
the Pyramids stand. It completely dispels the involuntary notion 
that one has formed of the solitary abruptness of the Three Pyra¬ 
mids. Not to speak of the groups, in the distance, of Abou-Sir, 
Sakara, and Dashur—the whole platform of this greatest of them 
all, is a maze of Pyramids and tombs. Three little ones stand 
beside the first, three also beside the third. The second and third 
are each surrounded by traces of square enclosures, and their eastern 
faces are approached through enormous masses of ruins as if of 
some great temple; whilst the first is enclosed on three sides by 
long rows of massive tombs, on which you look down from the 
top as on the plats of a stone-garden. You see in short that 
it is the most sacred and frequented part of that vast cemetery 
which extends all along the Western ridge for twenty miles behind 
Memphis. 

It is only by going round the whole place in detail that the con¬ 
trast between its present and its ancient state is disclosed. One is 


liv 


INTRODUCTION. 


inclined to imagine that the Pyramids are immutable, and that such as 
you see them now such they were always. Of distant views this is true, 
but taking them near at hand it is more easy from the existing ruins 
to conceive Karnac as it was, than it is to conceive the Pyramidal 
platform as it was. The smooth casing of part of the top of the 
Second Pyramid, and the magnificent granite blocks which form the 
lower stages of the third, serve to show what they must have been 
all, from top to bottom; the first and second, brilliant white or 
yellow limestone, smooth from top to bottom, instead of those rude 
disjointed masses which their stripped sides now present; the third, 
all glowing with the red granite from the Pirst Cataract. As it is, 
they have the barbarous look of Stonehenge; but then they must 
have shone with the polish of an age already rich with civilisation, 
and that the more remarkable when it is remembered that these 
granite blocks which furnished the outside of the third and inside 
of the first, must have come all the way from the First Cataract. 
It also seems from Herodotus and others, that these smooth out¬ 
sides were covered with sculptures. Then you must build up or 
uncover the massive tombs, now broken or choked with sand, so as 
to restore the aspect of vast streets of tombs, like those on the 
Appian Way, out of which the Great Pyramid would rise like a 
cathedral above smaller churches. Lastly, you must enclose the two 
other Pyramids with stone precincts and gigantic gateways, and 
above all you must restore the Sphinx, as he (for it must never be 
forgotten that a female Sphinx was almost unknown) was in the days 
of his glory. 

Even now, after all that we have seen of colossal statues, there 
was something stupendous in the sight of that enormous head—its 
vast projecting wig, its great ears, its open eyes, the red colour still 
visible on its cheek, the immense projection of the whole lower part 
of its face. Yet what must it have been when on its head there 
was the royal helmet of Egypt; on its chin the royal beard; 
when the stone pavement by which men approached the Pyramids 
ran up between its paws; when immediately under its breast an 
altar stood from which the smoke went up into the gigantic 
nostrils of that nose, now vanished from the face, never to be 
conceived again. All this is known with certainty from the 
remains which actually exist deep under the sand on which you 
stand, as you look up from a distance into the broken but still 
expressive features. 

And for what purpose was this Sphinx of Sphinxes called into 
being—as much greater than all other Sphinxes as the Pyramids are 
greater than all other temples or tombs? If, as is likely, he lay 
couched at the entrance, now deep in sand, of the vast approach to 
the second, that is, the Central Pyramid, so as to form an essential 
part of this immense group; still more, if, as seems possible, there 


EGYPT. 


was once intended to be (according to the usual arrangement which 
never left a solitary Sphinx any more than a solitary obelisk) a 
brother Sphinx on the Northern side, as this on the Southern side 
of the approach, its situation and significance was worthy of its 
grandeur. And if, further, the Sphinx was the giant representative 
of Royalty, then it fitly guards the greatest of Royal sepulchres; and, 
with its half human, half animal form, is the best welcome and the 
best farewell to the history and religion of Egypt. 


MAPS. 


I. Diagram op the Heights op Egypt, Sinai, and Palestine . Frontispiece. 

II. Egypt . .Page xxxiii. 

III. Peninsula op Sinai.. 5 

IV. Traditional Sinai.. 42 

V. Palestine .... •.. 113 

VI. South of Palestine . . . . . . . . 161 

VII. Plain of Esdraelon and Galilee . . . . . ,, 328 


WOODCUTS. 

PAGE 

1. Sretch-map of Syria. 108 

2. Sketch-plan of Jerusalem ......... 158 

3. Sketch-plan of Shechem.. . . . 224 

4. Sketch-plan of House at Nazareth and at Lop.etto . . . . 430 


[/» the references to the Plan of Loretto, figures 2 and 3 must be transposed.'] 








CHAPTER I. 

t 

PART I.—PENINSULA OF SINAI. 

PART II.—THE JOURNEY FROM CAIRO TO JERUSALEM. 


Exodus xiv. 13. “The Egyptians whom ye have seen to-day, ye 
shall see them again no more for ever.” 

Deut. viii. 15. “That great and terrible wilderness .... where 
there was no water.” 

Deut. xxxiii. 2. “ The Lord came from Sinai and rose up from Seir 

unto them : He shined forth from Mount Paran; and he came with 
the ten thousands [‘ of Kadesh.’ lxx].” 


B 






PART I. 


PENINSULA OF SINAI. 

I. General configuration of the Peninsula. 1. The Two Gulfs. 2. The 
Plateau of the Tih. 3. The Sandy Tract. 4. The Mountains of the Tdr. 
(a.) The Ka’a—the Shores. ( b .) The Passes, (c.) The Mountains ; the 

Three Groups—the Colours—the Confusion—the Desolation—the Silence. 
( d) The W&dys—the Vegetation—the Springs—the Oases. Pp. 1—20. 

II. General Adaptation to the History. The Scenery—the Physical Phe¬ 
nomena—the Present Inhabitants—Changes. Pp. 20—29. 

III. Traditions of the History. 1. Arab Traditions—of Moses. 2. Greek 
Traditions. 3. Early Traditions. Pp. 29— 35. 

IV. Route of the Israelites. 1. Passage of the Red Sea. 2. Marah and Elim. 

3. Encampment by the Red Sea. 4. Wilderness of Sin. 5. Choice 
between Serbal and Gebel Mousa as Sinai. 6. Special Localities of the 
History. Pp. 35—48. 

V. Later History of the Peninsula. 1. Elijah’s visit. 2. Josephus. 3. St. Paul. 

4. Hermitages, and Convent of St. Catherine. 5. Mahomet. 6. Present 
State of the Convent. 7. Tomb of Sheykh Saleh. Pp. 48—57. 

Note A. Mussulman'Traditions of the Exodus and Mount Sinai. P. 57- 
Note B. Sinaitic Inscriptions. Pp. 59—62. 


SINAI. 


PART I. 

PENINSULA OF SINAI. 

The Peninsula of Mount Sinai is, geographically and 
geologically speaking, one of the most remarkable districts 
on the face of the earth. It combines the three grand 
features of earthly scenery—the sea, the desert, and the 
mountains. It occupies also a position central to three 
countries, distinguished, not merely for their history, but 
for their geography amongst all other nations of the 
world—Egypt, Arabia, Palestine. And lastly, it has 
been the scene of a history, as unique as its situation ; 
by which the fate of the three nations which surround it, 
and through them the fate of the whole world, has been 
determined. 

It is a just remark of Chevalier Bunsen, that “ Egypt 
has, properly speaking, no history. History was born on 
that night when Moses led forth his people from Goshen.” 
Most fully is this felt as the traveller emerges from the 
Valley of the Nile, the study of the Egyptian monuments, 
and finds himself on the broad track of the Desert. In 
those" monuments, magnificent and instructive as they 
are, he sees great kings, and mighty deeds—the father, 
the son, and the children,—the sacrifices, the conquests, 
the coronations. But there is no before and after, no 
unrolling of a great drama, no beginning, middle, and 
end of a moral progress, or even of a mournful decline. 



4 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


General 
configura¬ 
tion. The 
Mountains, 
the Desert, 
and the 
Sea. 


In the Desert, on the contrary, the moment the green 
fields of Egypt recede from our view, still more when 
we reach the Red Sea, the further and further we 
advance into the Desert and the mountains, we feel that 
everything henceforward is continuous, that there is a 
sustained, and protracted interest, increasing more and 
more, till it reaches its highest point in Palestine, in 
Jerusalem, on Calvary, and on Olivet. And in the 
desert of Sinai this interest is enhanced by the fact that 
there it stands alone. Over all the other great scenes of 
human history,—Palestine itself, Egypt, Greece and Italy, 
—successive tides of great recollections have rolled, each 
to a certain extent obliterating the traces of the former. 
But in the Peninsula of Sinai there is nothing to interfere 
with the effect of that single event. The Exodus is the 
one only stream of history that has passed through this 
wonderful region,—a history, which has for its back¬ 
ground the whole magnificence of Egypt, and for its 
distant horizon, the forms, as yet unborn, of Judaism, of 
Mahometanism, of Christianity. 

It is this district, which, for the sake of, and in con¬ 
nection with that history, it is here proposed briefly to 
describe. 

I. The great limestone range of Syria, which begins in 
the north from Lebanon and extends through the whole 
of Palestine, terminates on the south in a wide table-land, 
which reaches eastward far into Arabia Petrsea, and 
westward far into Africa. At the point where this rocky 
mass descends from Palestine, another element falls in, 
which at once gives it a character distinct from moun¬ 
tainous tracts in other parts of the world; namely, that 
waterless region of the earth, which extends from the 
shores of the Atlantic to those of the Persian Gulf, under 
the familiar name of the Desert. But its character, both 
as a wilderness and as a mountain country, is broken by 
three great clefts, which divide its several portions from 
each other. The westernmost of these clefts is the deep 
valley, which descending from the mountains of Abyssinia 
contains the course of the solitary, mysterious, and 
majestic river, with the green strip of verdure lining its 























































































PENINSULA OF SINAI. 


5 


banks, which forms the land of Egypt. The second runs 
almost parallel to this—the bed not of a fertilising 
stream, but of a desolate sea,—the Arabian Gulf of the 
Greeks, the Gulf of Suez in modern geography. The third 
and easternmost cleft at its southern extremity is similar in 
character to the second, and forms the Elanitic Gulf of 
the Greeks, the modern Gulf of 'Akaba ; but further north 
it passes into the deep and wide valley of the ’Arabah, 
which in turn communicates with the still deeper valley 
of the Jordan, running up into the heart of the mountains 
of Lebanon, the original basis from which the whole of 
the system takes its departure. 

It is between those two gulfs, the Gulf of Suez, and the 
Gulf of 'Akaba, that the Peninsula of Sinai lies. From 
them it derives its contact with the sea, and therefore 
with the world; which is one striking distinction between 
it and the rest of the vast desert of which it forms a 
part. From hardly any point in the Sinaitic range is the 
view of the sea wholly excluded; from the highest points 
both of its branches are visible ; its waters, blue with a 
depth of colour more like that of some of the Swiss 
lakes than of our northern or midland seas, its tides 
imparting a life to the dead landscape,—familiar to 
modern travellers from the shores of the Atlantic or 
German ocean; but strange and inexplicable to the 
inhabitants of the ancient world, whose only knowledge 
of the sea was the vast tideless lake which washed 
the coasts of Egypt, Palestine, Greece, and Italy. It 
must have always brought to the mind of those who 
stood on its shores, that they were on the waters of 
a new, and almost unknown, world. Those tides 
come rolling in from the vast Indian Ocean; and with 
the Indian Ocean these two gulfs are the chief channels 
of communication from the Northern world. The 
white shells which strew their shores, the forests of sub¬ 
marine vegetation which gave the whole sea its Hebrew 
appellation of the “ Sea of Weeds/' the trees of coral, 
whose huge trunks may be seen even on the dry shore, 
with the red rocks and red sand, which especially in the 
Gulf of 'Akaba bound its sides,—all bring before us the 


1. The 
Two Gulfs 
of the Red 
Sea. 


6 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


mightier mass of the Red or Erythraean 1 Ocean, the coral 
strands of the Indian Archipelago, of which these two 
gulfs with their peculiar products are the northern off¬ 
shoots. The Peninsula itself has been the scene of but 
one cycle of human eyents. But it has, through its two 
watery boundaries, been encircled with two tides of 
history, which must not be forgotten in the associations 
which give it a foremost place in the geography and 
history of the world ; two tides, neyer flowing together, one 
falling as the other rose, but imparting to each of the two 
barren yalleys through which they flow a life and actiyity 
hardly less than that which has so long animated the 
valley of the Nile. The two great lines of Indian traffic 
have alternately passed up the eastern and the western 
gulf-, and, though unconnected with the greater events of 
the Peninsula of Sinai, the commerce of Alexandria and 
the communications of England with India, which now 
pass down the Gulf of Suez, are not without interest, as 
giving a lively image of the ancient importance of the 
twin Gulf of ’Akaba. That gul£ now wholly deserted, 
was, in the times of the Jewish monarchy, the great 
thoroughfare of the fleets of Solomon and Jehoshaphat, 


1 The appellation * Red Sea," as ap¬ 
plied distinctively to the tiro gulfs of 
Suez and ' Akai-a, is comparatively 
modem. It seems to have been apt lied 
to them only as continuations of the 
Indian Ocean, to which the name of 
the Erythraean or Red Sea was given, 
at a time when the two gulfs woe 
kn Dwn to the Hebrews only by the name 
of the “ Sea of Weeds," and to the 
Greeks by the name of the Bays of 
Arabia an d Elath. This in itself makes 
it probable that the name of c ReT was 
derived from the corals of the Indian 
ccean. and makes it impossible that it 
AmU have been fr om “E-Iom ,"'— 
the mountains of Edom, as is well 
kn - wn. hardly reaching to the shores 
of the gulf of ’Akaba, certainly not to 
the shores of the ocean. ‘ As we 
emerge I from the mouth of a small 
deSle," writes the late Captain New- 
bold, in describing his visit to the 
mountain of Nakus near Tor, u the 
waters of this sacred gulf burst upon 
our view; the surface marked with 


annular, crescent-shaped, and irregular 
blotches of a purplish red, extending as 
far as the eye could reach. They were 
curiously contrasted with the beautiful 
aqua marina of the water lying over 
the white coral reefs. This red colour 
I ascertained to be caused by the sub¬ 
jacent red sandstone and reddish coral 
reefs ; a similar phenomenon is observed 
in the straits of Babel-Man deb, and also 
near Suez, particularly when the rays 
of the sun fall on the water at a small 
angle."—Jonrn. of R. Asiat. Society, 
No. xiii, p. 78. This accurate descrip¬ 
tion is decisive as to the origin of the 
name, though Captain Newbold draws 
no such inference. The Hebrew word 
‘ supK” though used commonly for 
“flags” or “rushes,” would by an easy 
change be applied to any aqueous vege¬ 
tation (see Dietrich’s Abhandlungen, 
pp. 17, 23—25) ; just as Pliny (xiii. 25) 
speaks of it as “a vast forest; ” “ Ru- 
brum mare et totus ori^ntis oceanus 
refertui at sylrii.” (Ritter, Sinai, 466— 
4S2) See Part II. p. S3. 


PENINSULA OF SINAI. 


7 


and the only point in the second period of their history 
which brought the Israelites into connection with the 
scenes of the earliest wanderings of their nation. 

Such are the western and eastern boundaries of this 
mountain tract; striking to the eye of the geographer, 
as the two parallels to that narrow Egyptian land from 
which the Israelites came forth; important to the 
historian, as the two links of Europe and Asia with the 
great ocean of the south—as the two points of contact 
between the Jewish people and the civilisation of the 
ancient world. From the summit of Mount St. Catherine, 
or of Um-Shomer, a wandering Israelite might have seen 
the beginning and the end of his nation’s greatness. On the 
one side lay the sea through which they had escaped from 
the bondage of slavery and idolatry—still a mere tribe of 
the shepherds of the Desert. On the other side lay the 
sea, up which were afterwards conveyed the treasures of 
the Indies, to adorn the palace and the temple of the 
capital of a mighty empire. 

Of the three geological elements which compose the 
Peninsula itself , 1 the first and the most extensive is the 
northern table-land of limestone which is known as the 
Desert of the “ Tih,” or the “ Wanderings.” It is supported 
and enclosed by long horizontal ranges, which keep this 
uniform character wherever they are seen. They are 
the same which, under the name of the Mountains ol 
Pahah, first meet the eye of the traveller approaching 
Suez from Egypt, as forming the western boundary of 
the great plateau ; the same which, under the name of the 
Mountains of the Tih, run along its southern border, as 
seen from SerMl or St. Catherine ; and which, under the 
same name, form its eastern border, as seen from Mount 
Hor. However much the other mountains of the Peninsula 
vary in form or height, the mountains of the Tih are always 
alike ; always faithful to their tabular outline and blanched 
desolation. It is this which gives them a natural affinity 


1 For a lucid account of the geology 
of the Peninsula, I refer to a valuable 
paper on the subject by Captain New- 
bold in the Madras Journal, vol. xiv. 


pt. ii.; also to Russegger’s map, and to 
Mr. Hogg’s map and paper in Jameson’s 
Edinburgh Philosophical Journal, vols. 
xlviii. p. 193, xlix. p. 33. 


2. The 
Plateau or 
the Tih. 


8 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


3. The 

sandy 
Tract of 
Debbet-er 
Ramleh. 


of appearance with the two long limestone walls which 
confine the traveller’s view down the Valley of the Nile 
from Cairo to Thebes ; and, again, to the unbroken line 
of mountains which runs along the eastern side of the 
Jordan, from the Dead Sea to Mount Hermon . 1 

One solitary station-house and fort marks this wilder¬ 
ness. It probably derives its name of Nakhl, the “ Palm,” 
from an adjacent palm-grove, now vanished ; a miniature 
in this respect of the midway station for the great Syrian 
desert—“ Tadmor,” “ Palmyra ”—the palm-grove station 
of Solomon and Zenobia, whence in like manner the palms 
are now said to have disappeared . 2 It seems to have no 
peculiar features, beyond the general character of its 
horizontal hills, and its one wide undulating pebbly plain. 
If any of the stations of the Israelites mentioned in the 
Pentateuch were in this portion of the Peninsula, it is 
useless to seek for them; nor is there apparently any 
passage or scene in their wanderings which derives any 
special light from its scenery. Its one interest now 
is the passage of the Mecca pilgrimage. 

The plateau of the Tih is succeeded by the sandstone 
mountains which form the first approach to the higher 
Sinaitic range, called by the general Arabic name for a high 
mountain, the “ Tor.” One narrow plain or belt of sand, 
called from that circumstance the “ Debbet-er-Ramleh,” 
divides the table-land of the north from these mountains 
of the south ; the hills of “ the Tih ”—the seat of the 
tribe thence called “Tiyaha,”—from the hills of the 
“ Tor,” the seat of the tribe thence called “ Towara.” 
From Serbal and St. Catherine this yellow line of sand is 
distinctly visible; and seems to be, as its name implies, 
the only tract of pure sand which the desert of Sinai 
presents. The name is of itself sufficient to indicate to 

1 The Tih has been traversed and that “ Tadmor ” and “ Palmyra ” are 

described by Riippell, Burckhardt, and derived from the ‘palms f A palm is 
Bartlett from east to west, and by in Hebrew “ Tamar,” and not “ Tad- 
Robinson from south to north. The mor;” and in Greek (and Josephus 
passage of the Caravan has been de- says that the Greeks gave it the name 
scribed by Riippell and Bartlett. I did of Palmyra) ‘‘Phoenix” («i>ou'i£). See 
not see it, except from a distance. Hitzig; Zeitschrift der Deutschen Mor- 

2 Carne’s Recollections of the East, genlandischen Gesellschaft, vol. viii., 
vol. ii., p. 545. Is it quite certain 222. 


PENINSULA OF SINAI. 


9 


the experienced geographer, what the traveller soon learns 
by observation, that sand is properly speaking the excep¬ 
tion and not the rule of the Arabian desert. In the 
usual route from Cairo to Suez, and from Suez to ’Akaba, it 
occurs only once in any great quantity or depth : namely, 
in the hills immediately about Huderah, 1 where, it would 
seem, the Debbet-er-Ramleh terminates on reaching the 
sandstone cliffs which here shut off both it and the 
tableland of the Tih from the Gulf of ; Akaba. There, 
after traversing the whole Peninsula on hard ground of 
gravel, pebble, or rock, the traveller again finds himself 
in the deep sand-drifts which he has not seen since he 
left them on the western shores of the Nile, en¬ 
veloping the temples of Ipsambul, and the Serapeum 
of Memphis. It is important to notice this, partly as a 
correction of a popular error, partly as an illustration, 
negative indeed, but not altogether worthless, of the 
narrative of the Pentateuch. Whatever other sufferings 
the Israelites may have undergone, the great sand-drifts 
which the armies of Cambyses encountered in the desert 
of Africa are never mentioned, nor could have been 
mentioned, in their journeyings through the wilderness 
of Sinai. 

This brings us to the mountains of the Tor (as distinct 
from the Tih), which form, strictly speaking, the mountain- 
land of the Peninsula. This mass of mountains, rising in 
their highest points to the height of more than 9000 feet, 
forms the southern tower, if one may use the expression, 
of that long belt or chain of hills, of which the northern 
bulwark is the double range of Lebanon. It is the southern 
limit of the history of the Israelites. Their boundaries, in 
the narrower sense, were Dan and Beersheba ; in the wider 
sense, Lebanon and Sinai. 2 

It is with the configuration and aspect of this district 
that we are now chiefly concerned. The sandy plain which 
parts it from the table-land of the Till on the north has 
been already noticed. A similar plain, though apparently 
of gravel rather than of sand, under the name of El-Kaa, 3 

1 See Part II. p. 80. 3 Called “ Gah ” by Pococke (i. 137), 

2 See Chapter XII. and “ Gae,” by Lepsius. 


4. The 
Mountains 
of the T6r. 


(a) The 
KA’a, and 
the Shores. 


10 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


(6) The 
Passes. 


(c) The 
Mountain?. 


“ the plain/' runs along its south-western base, generally 
reaching the shores of the Gulf of Suez ; but at times 
interrupted by a lower line of hills, which form as it 
were the outposts of the Sinaitic range itself, and 
contain the two singular mountains, known respectively 
as the mountains of Nakus (the Bell), and Mokatteb 
(the Writing). On their north-western side, and on the 
whole of the eastern side of the Peninsula, the mountains 
of the Tor descend so steeply on the shores of the 
respective gulfs of the Bed Sea, that there is little more 
than the beach left between the precipitous cliffs and 
the rising tides. 

From these shores or plains the traveller ascends into 
the mountain triangle of which they form the three 
sides. It is approached for the most part by rugged 
passes, leading to the higher land above, from which 
spring the cliffs and mountains themselves. These 
begin in a gradual, but terminate usually in a very 
steep, ascent—almost a staircase of rock—resembling 
the “ Puertas ” of the Andalusian table-land ; that, 
for example, of Gaucin, on the way from Gibraltar to 
Ronda’; or of Sapphira, on the way from Malaga to 
Granada. To these steep and rugged defiles is 
given the name of “Nakb,” or “'Akaba.” It is from 
one of these—that down which the Egyptian pilgrimage 
descends, on the eastern branch of the Red Sea— 
that the gulf and town of 'Akaba derives its name. 1 
The others of note, are the Nakb-Badera, which is 
the chief entrance to the cluster of Serbal ; the Nakb- 
Hawy, to the cluster of Sinai; the Nakb-Um-Rachi, 
through which the whole range is approached from the 
“ Tih.” 

The cluster itself consists (speaking in general and 
popular language) of two formations—sandstone, and 
granite or porphyry. These two formations, of which it 
may be said generally that the first constitutes the 


1 There is another, ’ Akaba-es Sh&m— forms the great ascent from the lower 
“the Pass of the Syrian Pilgrimage” level of Arabia to the higher level of 
■—on the eastern side of the ’Arabah Syria. 

(see Burckhardt’s Arabia, ii., 94) which 


PENINSULA OF SINAI. 


northern, and the latter the southern division, play 
an important part, both in its outward aspect and in 
its history. To these it owes the depth and variety 
of colour, which distinguish it from almost all other 
mountainous scenery. Sandstone 1 and granite alike 
lend the strong red hue, which, when it extends 
further eastward, is, according to some interpreta¬ 
tions, connected with the name of “ Edom.” It 
was long ago described by Diodorus Siculus as of a 
bright scarlet hue, and is represented in legendary 
pictures as of a brilliant crimson. But viewed even 
in the soberest light, it gives a richness to the whole 
mountain landscape which is wholly unknown in the 
grey and brown suits of our northern hills. Sandstone, 
moreover, when, as in the Wady Megara, and on the 
cliffs which line the shores of the Red Sea, it has 
become liable to the infirmities of age and the depre¬ 
dations of water, presents us with those still more 
extraordinary hues, of which the full description must be 
reserved for the scene of their greatest exemplification in 
the rocks of Petra. 2 In these formations, too, we trace 
the connection of the Sinai tic range with the two adjacent 
countries, and with the historical purposes to which their 
materials have been turned. The limestone ranges of 
the Till, in their abutment on the Valley of the Nile, fur¬ 
nished the quarries of the Pyramids. It was the soft 
surface of these sandstone cliffs which, in the Wady 
Mokatteb, offered ready tablets to the writers of the so- 
called Sinaitic inscriptions and engravings, and to Egyptian 
sculptors in the Wady Megara and the valley of Sarbut- 
el-Kedem, just as the continuation of the same formation, 
far away to the south-west, reappears in the consecrated 
quarries of the gorge of Silsilis, whence were hewn the 
vast materials for the Temples of Thebes; as the same 
cliffs, far away to the east, lent themselves to the 
excavations of the Edomites and Nabataeans at Petra, and 
of ancient Ammon 3 and Moab in the deep defiles of the 
Arnon. So, too, the granite mountains, on whose hard 

1 Ruppell, p. 188. 2 See Part II., xvii. 

3 See Lynch’s “Dead Sea,” p. 368. 




12 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


blocks were written the Ten Commandments of the 
Mosaic Law, and whose wild rents and fantastic forms 
have furnished the basis of so many monastic or 
Bedouin legends, reappear in Egypt at the First Cataract, 
in the grotesque rocks that surround the island of Philae, 
and in the vast quarries of Syene ; and are to be found 
far off to the east, in Arabia Felix, forming the vast 
granite mass 1 of Ohod, the scene of Mahomet's first 
victory near Medina. 

The Three The mountains, thus flanked by the sandstone forma- 

Groups; tions—being themselves the granitic kernel of the 
whole region—are divided into two, or, perhaps, three 
groups, each with a central summit. These are (1) 
the north-western cluster, which rises above Wady 
Feiran, and of which the most remarkable mountain 
—being in some respects also the most remarkable in 
the whole peninsula—is Mount Serbal; (2) the eastern 
and central cluster, of which the highest point is Mount 
St. Catherine ;—and (3) the south-eastern cluster, which 
forms as it were the outskirts of the central mass, the 
highest point of which is Um-Shomer, the most elevated 
summit of the whole range. Of these points Mount 
St. Catherine with most of its adjacent peaks has. been 
ascended by many travellers ; Mount Serbal by a very 
few, of whom only four have recorded their ascent ; 
Um-Shomer has been ascended by none except Burck- 
hardt, and by him not quite to the summit. 

Reserving for the present the more special character¬ 
istics of these respective clusters, their general peculiarities 

the Colours ; may be best given in common. The colours 2 have been 
already mentioned. Red, with dark green, are the pre¬ 
dominant hues ; the two are most markedly combined 
in the long line of Gebel Mousa, as Pococke, with more 
than his usual observation, noticed long ago. . These 
colours, especially in the neighbourhood of Serbal, are 


1 Burckhardt, ii., 231. 

2 The most accurate description of 
the colours of the Desert is that given 
by Dx\ Olin. (Travels, i., 372, 390.) 
Unfortunately, no published views ever 
attempt it. The three peaks of red 


granite which overhang the northern 
side of the Valley of Chamouni, called 
from their colour the Aiguilles Rouges, 
give some notion of the colour and 
form of Sinai. 


PENINSULA OF SINAI. 


13 


diversified by the long streaks of purple which 
run over them from top to bottom. But it is only in 
the parts of the sandstone cliffs where the surface has 
been broken away, as in the caves of the Wady Megara, 
or on the shores of the two gulfs, that they present 
the great variety of colour which reaches its highest pitch 
at Petra. 

Another feature, less peculiar, but still highly charac¬ 
teristic, is the infinite complication of jagged peaks 
and varied ridges. When seen from a distance, as from 
the hills between Sinai and 'Akaba, this presents as fine 
an outline of mountain scenery as can be conceived, but 
the beauty and distinctness of a nearer view is lost in 
its multiplied and intricate confusion — the cause no 
doubt, in part, of the numerous mistakes made by tra¬ 
vellers in their notice of the several peaks to be seen 
from this or that particular point. It is this charac¬ 
teristic which Sir Frederick Henniker has described, 
with a slight exaggeration of expression, when he says 
that the view from Gebel Mousa (where this particular 
aspect is seen to the greatest perfection) is as if 
“Arabia Petrsea were an ocean of lava, which, whilst 
its waves were running mountains high, had suddenly 
stood still.” 

It is an equally striking, and more accurate, expression 
of the same traveller, when he speaks of the whole range 
as being “ the Alps unclothed/' 1 This—their union of 
grandeur with desolation—is the point of their scenery 
absolutely unrivalled. They are the “Alps" of Arabia 
—but the Alps planted in the Desert, and therefore 
stripped of all the clothing which goes to make up our 
notions of Swiss or English mountains ; stripped of the 
variegated drapery of oak, and birch, and pine, and 
fir; of moss, and grass, and fern, which to landscapes 
of European hills, are almost as essential as the rocks 
and peaks themselves. Of all the charms of Switzer¬ 
land, the one which most impresses a traveller recently 
returned from the East, is the breadth and depth of its 


the Confu¬ 
sion ; 


the Deso¬ 
lation ; 


i Notes during a Visit to Egypt, &c., p. 214. 


14 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


and the 
Silence. 


verdure. The very name of “Alp” is strictly applied only 
to the green pasture-lands enclosed by rocks or glaciers; 
—a sight in the European Alps so common, in these 
Arabian Alps so wholly unknown. The absence of ver¬ 
dure, it need hardly be said, is due to the absence of 
water—of those perennial streams which are at once the 
creation and the life of every other mountain district. 

And it is this probably, combined with the peculiarity 
of the atmosphere, that produces the deep stillness and 
consequent reverberation of the human voice, which 
can never be omitted in any enumeration of the charac¬ 
teristics of Mount Sinai. From the highest point of 
Ras Sasafeh to its lower peak, a distance of about sixty 
feet, the page of a book, distinctly but not loudly read, 
was perfectly audible ; and every remark of the various 
groups of travellers descending from the heights of the 
same point rose clearly to those immediately above them. 
It was the belief of the Arabs who conducted Niebuhr , 1 
that they could make themselves heard across the Gulf 
of ; Akaba ; a belief doubtless exaggerated, yet probably 
originated or fostered by the great distance to which 
in those regions the voice can actually be carried. And 
it is probably from the same cause that so much attention 
has been excited by the mysterious noises which have from 
time to time been heard on the summit of Gebel Mousa, 
in the neighbourhood of Um-Shdmer, and in the mountain 2 
of N&kus, or the Bell, so called from the legend that the 
sounds proceed from the bells 3 of a convent enclosed 
within the mountain. In this last instance the sound is 
supposed to originate in the rush of sand down the 
mountain side; sand, here, as elsewhere, playing the 
same part as the waters or snows of the north. In 
the case of Gebel Mousa, where it is said that the monks 
had originally settled on the highest peak, but were by 


1 Description de 1’Arable, p. 245. 

2 See the picture and description of 
this mountain in Wellsted, ii., 24; and 
a more complete and singularly graphic 
account by Captain Newbold, Journal 
of the It. Asiatic Society, No. xiii., 79. 

3 I use the word “ bell ” for the sake 


of convenience. But “ the sound of 
the church-going bell,” is unknown in 
the East; and “ n&kfts ” is really the 
rude cymbal or sounding-board used in 
Greek churches, such as are described 
further on in the Convent of St. 
Catherine. 


PENINSULA OF SINAI. 


these strange noises driven down to their present seat 
in the valley; and in the case of Um-Shomer, where 
it was described to Burckhardt as like the sound of 
artillery, the precise cause has never been ascertained. 

But in all these instances the effect must have been 
heightened by the deathlike silence of a region 
where the fall of waters, even the trickling of brooks, 
is unknown. 

This last peculiarity of the Sinai range brings us to 
another, which has hardly been sufficiently described in 
the accounts of the Desert — namely, the valleys or 
“ wadys.” 

It is by a true instinct that the Bedouins, as a general (d) The 
rule, call the mountains not by any distinctive name, but W4( b s - 
after the valleys or wadys which surround them. As 
in Europe the configuration of a country, especially of a 
mountain country, depends on its rivers, so the configura¬ 
tion of the Desert of Sinai depends on its wadys. It is 
necessary to use this Arabic name, because there is no 
English word which exactly corresponds to the idea 
expressed by it. A hollow, a valley, a depression 
—more or less deep, or wide, or long—worn or washed 
by the mountain torrents or winter rains for a few 
months or weeks in the year—such is the general idea 
of an Arabian “wady,” whether in the Desert or in 
Syria. The Hebrew word (nachal), which is, as nearly 
as possible, the correlative of the W&dy of the Arabic, 
is unfortunately confounded in our translation with a 
distinct word (nahar) under the common version of 
“river,” though occasionally rendered, with a greater 
attempt at accuracy, by the name of “ brook.” 1 

For a few weeks or days in the winter these valleys 
present, it is said, the appearance of rushing streams. A 
graphic description is given of this sudden conversion of 
the dry bed of the W4dy Mousa into a thundering 


1 The word wddy (spelt by the French. which apparently the fundamental 
ouadi), is properly a “ hollow between idea must be to “ perforate by water.’’ 
hills, whether dry or moist.” It is Nachal, in like manner, is probably 
said’to be derived from “ wada,” a from chalal, to “perforate” See 
verb of a strange signification, but of Appendix, sub vocc. 


16 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


mountain torrent, in Miss Martineau's account of Petra. 
Another such is recorded by Wellsted. near Tor . 1 The 
Wady Shellal (the Valley of the Cataracts) both in its 
name and aspect bears every trace of its wintry cascades. 
But their usual aspect is absolutely bare and waste; only 
presenting the image of thirsty desolation the more 
strikingly, from the constant indications of water which 
is no longer there. But so essentially are they, in other 
respects, the rivers of the Desert, and so entirely are 
they the only likeness to rivers which an Arab could 
conceive, that in Spain we find the name reproduced 
by the Arab conquerors of Andalusia ; sometimes, indeed, 
fitly enough, as applied to the countless water-courses of 
Southern Spain, only filled like the valleys of Arabia by a 
sudden descent of showers, or melting of snow; but some¬ 
times to mighty rivers, to which the torrents of the Desert 
could furnish only the most general parallel. Few who pass 
to and fro along the majestic river between Cadiz and 
Seville, remember that its name is a recollection of the 
Desert far away ; the Arab could find no other appellation 
for the Bsetis than that of “The Great Wady”—Guad-al- 
Khebir . 2 

To these waterless rivers the Desert owes its boundaries, 
its form, its means of communication, as truly as the 


1 Quoted in Ritter, Sinai, p. 456. 
These instances, to which others might 
be added, are a complete answer to the 
doubt expressed by Mr. Fazakerley of 
the accuracy of Niebuhr’s statements of 
these winter torrents. (Walpole’s Me¬ 
moirs, ii., 301.) 

2 A still more remarkable instance 
of this violent adaptation of the scanty 
nomenclature of the Desert to the 
varied features of European scenery, 
has been pointed out by M. Engelhard t, 
in his learned work on the valleys of 
Monte Rosa. It appears that in the 
ninth and tenth centuries the valley 
of Saas was occupied by a band of 
Saracens; and M. Engelhardt ingeni¬ 
ously, though in one or two instances 
fancifully, derives the existing names 
of the localities in that valley from 
these strange occupants. Amongst these 
are the Monte Moro —the Pass of the 
Moors—and the two villages or stations 


of Almagal, and the mountain of Mis- 
chebel; of which the former, by the 
likeness of its first syllable to the 
Arabian article al, the latter of its 
termination to the word gebel, cer¬ 
tainly confirm the hypothesis. But the 
most curious and the most probable 
is the name of the huge glacier through 
which rushes the wild torrent of the 
Visp. Hardly two objects less like can 
be conceived than that mass of ice, 
with its lake reflecting the glaciers in 
the tranquil water, and the abundant 
stream gushing from its bosom, on the 
one hand; and on the other hand, the 
scanty rivulet or pool in the hot rocky 
bed of the Desert, fringed with palm or 
acacia. But this was the only image 
which the Arabs had of a source or 
spring of a river. And “ Al-al-’Ain,” ac¬ 
cordingly, is the present name of the 
glacier of their Alpine valley. 


PENINSULA OP SINAI. 


17 


countries or districts of Europe owe theirs to the living 
streams which divide range from range, and nation 
from nation. Sometimes, as in the Wady Tayibeh and 
the Wady Sayal,a broad and winding track; sometimes, 
as in the Wady Mousa, closed between overarching cliffs ; 
sometimes, as in the Wady Es-Sheykh, having a vast margin 
on each side, such as, in a happier soil and climate, would 
afford pasturage for a thousand cattle; sometimes, as in 
the Wady Sidri, expanding into a level space, where, in 
Switzerland and Westmoreland, the surrounding preci¬ 
pices would descend, not as there on a waste of sand or 
gravel, but on a bright and transparent lake ; they yet all 
have this in common, that they are the high roads of the 
Desert : the stations, the tribes, the mountains, are as 
truly along their banks, and distinguished by their 
courses, as if they were rivers or railroads. By observ- 
* ing their peculiarities, their points of junction, and their 
general direction, any one who had once traversed 
the route from Cairo to Petra, would probably find his 
way back without any great risk or difficulty. And, as 
in western countries, amongst a variety of lesser streams 
there is generally one commanding river which absorbs 
all the rest, and serves as the main line of communication 
for the whole region, so it is with the wadys of the 
Desert. Um-Shomer, St. Catherine, and Serbal, are not 
more decisively the dominant summits of the Sinaitic 
mountains, than is the Wady Es-Sheykh—the “ valley of 
the saint ”—the queen of the Sinaitic rivers. The immense 
curve by which it connects the two great clusters of the 
Peninsula is as clear in reality as on the map. 

Thus the general character of the wadys as well as 
of the mountains of Sinai, is entire desolation. If the 
mountains are naked Alps, the valleys are dry rivers. But 
there are exceptions in both instances. There is nearly 
everywhere a thin, it might almost be said a transparent, 
coating of vegetation. There are occasional spots of ver¬ 
dure, which escape notice in a general view, but for that 
very reason are the more remarkable when observed. It 
is said that travellers, on arriving at Lisbon from Madrid, 
after crossing the bare table-land of central Spain, are 


The Vege¬ 
tation ; 


18 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


The 

Springs ; 


asked, “ Do you remember that tree you passed on the 
road ? ” The same feeling is more strongly experienced 
in the passage of the Desert. Not perhaps every single 
tree, but every group of trees, lives in the traveller’s 
recollection as distinctly as the towns and spires of 
civilised countries. Accordingly, both the valleys, and 
(where they are not named directly from the valleys) the 
mountains also are usually named from the slight vegeta¬ 
tion by which they are distinguished from each other. 
The highest peak of the whole range is known by no other 
name than the trivial appellation of Um-Shomer,—“the 
mother of fennel,”—doubtless from the fennel which 
Burckhardt describes as characteristic of the Peninsula. 
That part of the Ras Sasafeh, which represents, according 
to Dr. Robinson’s view 7 , the Horeb of Moses, is the “ willow- 
head,” from the group of two or three willows which 
grow in the Wady Sasafeh, in its recesses. Serbal is 
possibly so called from the ser, or myrrh, which creeps 
over its ledges up to the very summit. And (judging 
by this analogy) the most probable origin even of the 
ancient “Sinai” is the seneh or acacia, with wdiich, as 
we know, it then abounded. The Wady Abou-Hamad is 
from the old fig-tree—the “ father of fig-trees ”—in its deep 
clefts ; the Wady Sidri from its bushes of wild thorn ; 1 
the Wady Sayal from the acacia; the Wady Tayibeh, 
from the “ goodly ” water and vegetation it contains . 2 

The more definitely marked spots of verdure, however, 
are the accompaniments not of the empty beds of winter 
torrents, but of the few living, perhaps perennial, springs, 
which, by the mere fact of their rarity, assume an 
importance difficult to be understood in the moist scenery 


1 See Ritter, Sinai, pp. 346, 748. 

2 The names of the Alps are, for the 
most part, derived from some pecu¬ 
liarity of the mountain—the Wetter- 
horn, Silberhorn, the Jungfrau, Mont 
Blanc, and the like. But one of the 
most striking has received its name, 
like those Arabian hills, from the vege¬ 
tation of the valleys at its foot. The 
marvellous peak of “ the Mattei’horn ” 
is so called, not from its extraordi¬ 
nary formation and shape, but from 
the fact that the first view of it usually 


obtained brings it before us in con¬ 
nection with the green pastures and 
woods of Matt or Zer-Matt, above 
which it rises; “Matt” being the pro¬ 
vincial word for meadow or mead, of 
which it is in fact only another form 
—as in An-der-Matt, the village on 
the mead of the St. Gothard Pass. 
The German name of the mountain is 
thus “ the peak of the meadows ,” as the 
Italian name (for a similar reason) is 
Monte Silvio — the Mountain of the 
Forests. 


PENINSULA OF SINAI. 


19 


of the West and North. These springs, whose sources are 
for the most part high up in the mountain clefts, occasion¬ 
ally send down into the wadys rills of water, which how¬ 
ever scanty—however little deserving of the name even of 
brooks 1 —yet become immediately the nucleus of whatever 
vegetation the desert produces. Often their course can 
be traced, not by visible water, but a track of moss here, 
a fringe of rushes there, a solitary palm, a group of acacias 
—which at once denote that an unseen life is at work. 
Wherever these springs are’to be found, there, we cannot 
doubt, must always have been the resort of the wanderers 
in the Desert; and they occur at such frequent intervals, 
that, after leaving Suez, there is at least one such spot 
in each successive day’s journey. In two of the great 
wadys which lead from the first beginnings of the 
Sinai range to the Gulf of Suez—Ghurundel, and 
Useit with its continuation of the Wady Tayibeh— 
such tracts of vegetation are to be found in considerable 
luxuriance. In a still greater degree is this the case in all 
the various wadys leading down from the Sinai range 
to the Gulf of ’Akaba—of which the Wady El-’Ain is 
described by Riippell and by Miss Martineau; the Wady 
Sumghy by Dr. Robinson; and the Wady Kyd by 
Burckhardt—in all of which this union of vegetation 
with the fantastic scenery of the desolate mountains 
presents a combination as beautiful as it is extraordi¬ 
nary. In three spots, however, in the Desert, and in 
three only, so far as appears, this vegetation is brought by 
the concurrence of the general configuration of the country 
to a still higher pitch. By far the most remarkable 
collection of springs is that which renders the cluster of 
Gebel Mousa the chief resort of the Bedouin tribes during 
the summer heats. Four abundant sources in the moun¬ 
tains immediately above the Convent of St. Catherine must The Oases, 
always have made that region one of the most frequented 
of the Desert. But there are two other such spots, of con¬ 
siderable importance. It has been already observed that, 

1 Riippell notices four perennial 4. The W&dy Hebr&n. I only saw 
brooks : 1. The W&dy El-’Ain. 2. The the first and third. See Part II. vi. 

W4dy Sal aka. 3. The W4dy Feir4n. rii. xii. 





20 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


General 
adaptation 
to the his¬ 
tory. 


The 

Scenery. 


in order fully to understand the geography of Sinai, we 
must combine it with the geography of the neighbouring 
countries. Every one has heard of the Oasis of Ammon, 
in the western desert of the Nile. What that oasis is 
on a great scale may be seen on a small scale elsewhere ; 
namely, deep depressions of the high table-land, which 
thus become the receptacles of all the rain and torrents, 
and, consequently, of the vegetation and the life of the 
whole of that portion of the Desert. These oases, 
therefore, are to be found wherever the waters from 
the different wadys or hills, whether from winter- 
streams, or from such living springs as have just been 
described, converge to a common reservoir. One such 
oasis in the Sinaitic desert seems to be the palm-grove of 
El-Wady at Tor, 1 —the seaport half way down the Gulf of 
Suez,—which receives all the waters which flow down from 
the higher range of Sinai to the sea. The other, and the 
more important, is the Wady Feiran, high up in the table¬ 
land of Sinai itself; but apparently receiving all the 
w r aters which, from the springs and torrents of the central 
cluster of Mount Sinai, flow through the Wady Es-Sheykh 
into this basin, where their further exit is forbidden 
by the rising ground in the Wady Feiran. 2 These 
two green spots are the oases of Sinai, and, with the 
nucleus of springs in Gebel Mousa, form the three chief 
centres of vegetation in the Peninsula. 

II. This is the general conformation of the scenery 
through which the Israelites passed. Even if their precise 
route were unknown, yet the peculiar features of the 
country have so much in common that the history would 
still receive many remarkable illustrations. They were 
brought into contact with a desolation, which was forcibly 
contrasted with the green Valley of the Nile. They were 
enclosed within a sanctuary of temples and pyramids not 
made with hands,—the more awful from its total dissimi¬ 
larity to anything which they or their fathers could have 

1 Burckhardt (Arabia, ii., 362) de- T6r, in a valley called emphatically, in¬ 
scribes the palm-grove as so thick, that Wady, “ The W&dy.” (Wellsted. ii., 9.) 
he could hardly find his way through 2 See Part II. vi. Tor I did not 
it. It is two miles from the village of see. 


PENINSULA OF SINAI. 


21 


remembered in Egypt or in Palestine. They were wrapt 
in a silence which gave full effect to the morning and 
the evening shout with which the encampment rose 
and pitched, and still more to the 4 thunders, and the voice 
exceeding loud’ on the top of Horeb. The Prophet and 
his People were thus secluded from all former thoughts 
and associations, that 


“ Separate from the world, his breast 
Might duly take and strongly keep, 
The print of God to be exprest 
Ere long on Sion’s steep.” 1 


Not less illustrative, though perhaps less explanatory, 
of the more special incidents recorded, are some of the 
more local peculiarities of the Desert. The occasional 
springs, and wells, and brooks, are in accordance with 
the notices of the “waters” of Marah; the “springs” 
(mistranslated ‘‘wells”) of Elim; the “brook” of Horeb; the 
“ well” of Jethro’s daughters, with its “troughs” or tanks, 
in Midian . 2 The vegetation is still that which we should 
infer from the Mosaic history. The wild Acacia (Mimosa 
Niiotico ), under the name of “ sont,” everywhere repre¬ 
sents the “ seneh ” or “ senna ” of the Burning Bush . 3 
A slightly different form of the tree, equally common 
under the name of “ sayal,” is the ancient “ Shittah,” 4 or, 
as more usually expressed in the plural form (from the 
tangled thickets into which its stem expands), the 
“ Shittim,” 5 of which the tabernacle was made,—an inci¬ 
dental proof, it may be observed, of the antiquity of 
the institution, inasmuch as the acacia, though the chief 
growth of the Desert, is very rare in Palestine . 6 The 
“ Retem,” or wild broom, with its high canopy and white 
blossoms, gives its name to one of the stations of the 
Israelites (Rithmah ), 7 and is the very shrub under 


1 Keble’s Christian Year, 13th Sun¬ 
day after Trinity. I have everywhere 
quoted from this work the illustrations 
it contains of Scripture scenery, not 
only because of its wide circulation, 
but because the careful attention of its 
learned author to all local allusions 
renders it almost a duty to test these 
allusions, whenever opportunity occurs, 
by reference to the localities them¬ 
selves. 


2 Ex. xv. 23,27; Deut.ix.21; Ex.ii.16. 

5 Ex. iii. 2; Deut. xxxiii. 16. See 
Part II. iv. 

4 Isa. xli. 19. 

5 Exod. xxv. 5, 10, 13; xxvi. 26; 
xxvii. 1, 6, &c. 

6 The gum which exudes from it is 
said to be the old Arabian frankincense, 
and is brought from Sinai by Tor. See 
Clarke’s Travels, vol. v., 75. 

7 Num. xxxiii. 18, 19. 


22 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


which—in the only subsequent passage which connects 
the Desert with the history of Israel—Elijah slept 1 
in his wanderings. The “ palms,” not the graceful trees 
of Egypt, but the hardly less picturesque wild palms of 
uncultivated regions, with their dwarf trunks and shaggy 
branches, vindicate by their very appearance the title of 
being emphatically the “ trees ” of the Desert ; 2 and there¬ 
fore, whether in the cluster of the seventy palm trees 
of the second station of the wanderings , 3 or in the grove, 
which still exists at the head of the Gulf of ’Akaba , 4 were 
known by the generic name of “Elim,” “Elath,” or “Eloth ,” 5 
“ the trees.” The “tarfa” or tamarisk, is not mentioned by 
name in the history of the Exodus; yet, if the tradition 
of the Greek Church and of the Arabs be adopted, it is 
inseparably connected with the wanderings by the 
“ manna ” which distils from it, as gum-arabic from the 
acacia. It is also brought within the limit of their earlier 
history by the grove of “ tamarisks,” 6 which Abraham 
planted round the wells of Beersheba, as soon as he 
had exchanged the vegetation of Palestine,—the oaks of 
Moreh and of Mamre,—for the wild and scanty shrubs 
of the desert frontier. The “lasaf,” or “asaf,” the caper 
plant, the bright green creeper, which climbs out of the 
fissures of the rocks in the Sinaitic valleys , 7 has been 
identified on grounds of great probability with the 


1 1 Kings xix. 4, mistranslated “ju¬ 
niper.” It is the “spartium juncum” 
of Linnaeus. In Job xxx. 4, it is de¬ 
scribed as the food of the wild inhabit¬ 
ants of Edom when driven into the 
Desert. The word is also used in 
Ps. cxx. 4. See Part II. iv. xii. 

2 The palms in the palm-grove at T6r 
are all registered. Property in them 
is capital; marriage portions are given 
in dates, like tulips in Holland. (Hen- 
niker, p. 217.) 

3 Exod.xv.27; xvi. 1; Num. xxxiii. 9. 

4 Deut. ii. 8 ; 1 Kings ix. 26; 2 Kings 
xiv. 22 ; xvi. 6 ; 2 Chr. viii. 17 ; xxvi. 2. 

5 It is the same word which in Pales¬ 
tine is used habitually for the ilex or 

terebiMh; an instructive change, be¬ 

cause the terebinth is as emphatically 
the distinguished tree (if one may so 
say) of Palestine, as the palm is of the 
Desert. See Chapter II. p. 140. 


6 The “ Eshel ” ( &povpa, LXX.) of Gen. 

xxi. 33. It is also used in 1 Sam. 

xxii. 6, for a tree at Ramah; and in 
1 Sam. xxxi. 13, for a tree at Jabesh, 
which in 1 Chron. x. 12, is called an 
“ oak ” (Elah). This last example perhaps 
throws doubt on the previous usage. 
But it can hardly be doubted that the 
tamarisk is intended in Gen. xxi. 33. 
See Part II. iv., and Appendix. 

7 Rittei*, Sinai, 345, 761. I remember 
it especially in the Wady Shell&l, the 
Wady El-’Ain, and the Sik at Petra. 
(See Part II. pp. 70, 81, 90.) To us, as 
to Lepsius and Forskal, the Bedouin 
name seemed to be Lasaf or Lose/. 
But it is the same as Burekhardt, 
Frey tag, and Richardson give under 
the name of Aszef and Asaf; and the 
other form is probably only a corrup¬ 
tion of al-asaf (See Journal of R. Asiat. 
Soc., No. xv. 203); as, on the contrary, 


PENINSULA OF SINAI. 


23 


‘‘hyssop" or “ezob” of Scripture, and thus explains 
whence came the green branches used, even in the Desert, 
for sprinkling the water over the tents of the Israelites . 1 

Again, it has often been asked whether there are any 
natural phenomena by which the wonders of the giving of 
the Law can be explained or illustrated. There are at 
first sight many appearances which, to an unpractised eye, 
seem indications of volcanic agency. But they are all, it is 
believed, illusory. The vast heaps, as of calcined mountains, 
are. only the detritus of iron in the sandstone formation . 2 
The traces of igneous action on the granite rocks belong 
to their first upheaving, not to any subsequent convulsions. 
Everywhere there are signs of the action of water, nowhere 
of fire. On the other hand the mysterious sounds which 
have been mentioned on Um-Shomer and Gebel Mousa, 
may be in some way connected with the terrors described 
in the Mosaic narrative. If they are, they furnish an 
additional illustration, not to say an additional proof, of 
the historical truth of the narrative. If they are not, it 
must rest, as heretofore, on its own internal evidence. 

Finally, the relation of the Desert to its modern 
inhabitants is still illustrative of its ancient history. The 
general name by which the Hebrews called “ the wilder¬ 
ness," including always that of Sinai, was “ the pasture." 3 
Bare as the surface of the Desert is, yet the thin clothing of 
vegetation, which is seldom entirely withdrawn, especially 
the aromatic shrubs on the high hill-sides, furnish sufficient 
sustenance for the herds of the six thousand Bedouins who 
constitute the present population of the Peninsula. 


Along the mountain ledges green, 
The scatter’d sheep at will may glean 
The Desert’s spicy stores.” 4 


Bethany is sometimes called El-Az- 
arieh, from a corruption of Lazcirieh. 
The arguments in favour of the 
identification are thus summed up 
by Professor Royle. “ It is found in 
Lower Egypt, in the deserts of Sinai 
. . . Its habit is to grow on the most 
barren soil, or rocky precipice, or the 
side of a wall. ... It has, moreover, 
always been supposed to possess 
cleansing properties, [especially in cu¬ 
taneous disorders. Pliny, H. N., xx. 


15]. . . It is capable of yielding a 
stick, to which the sponge might be 
affixed.” (Journal of R. Asiat. Soc., No. 
xv. p. 202.) The word vao-unos seems 
to have been used by the LXX as the 
Greek name most nearly resembling 
the Hebrew “ Ezob ” in sound, though 
differing in sense.—Thus B apis is used 
for “ Bireh,” and B aj/xos for “ Bamah .” 

1 Numb. xix. 18. 2 See Part II. vi. 

3 “Midbar.” See Appendix, sub voce. 

4 Christian Year, 5th Sunday in Lent. 


The physi¬ 
cal pheno¬ 
mena. 


The present 
inhabitants. 


24 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


Change in 
the features 
of the De¬ 
sert. 


So were they seen following the daughters or the shepherd- 
slaves of Jethro. So may they be seen climbing the rocks, 
or gathered round the pools and springs of the valleys, 
under the charge of the black-veiled Bedouin women of 
the present day. And in the Tiyaha, Towara, or Alouin 
tribes, with their chiefs and followers, their dress, and 
manners, and habitations, we probably see the likeness of 
the Midianites, the Amalekites, and the Israelites them¬ 
selves in this their earliest stage of existence. The long 
straight lines of black tents which cluster round the Desert 
springs, present to us on a small scale the image of the 
vast encampment gathered round the one Sacred Tent 
which, with its coverings of dyed skins, stood conspicuous 
in the midst, and which recalled the period of their 
nomadic life long after their settlement in Palestine. 1 The 
deserted villages—marked by rude enclosures of stone— 
are doubtless such as those to which the Hebrew wanderers 
gave the name of “ Hazeroth,” 2 and which afterwards 
furnished the type of the primitive sanctuary at Shiloh. 3 
The rude burial-grounds, with the many nameless head¬ 
stones, far away from human habitation, are such as the 
host of Israel must have left behind them at the different 
stages of their progress—at Massah, at Sinai, at Kibroth- 
hattaavah, “ the graves of desire.” The salutations of the 
chiefs, in their bright scarlet robes, the one “ going out to 
meet the other,” the “ obeisance,” the “ kiss ” on each side 
the head, the silent entrance into the tent for consultation, 
are all graphically described in the encounter between 
Moses and Jethro. 4 The constitution of the tribes, 
with the subordinate degrees of sheykhs, recommended 
by Jethro to Moses, is the very same which still exists 
amongst those who are possibly his lineal descendants— 
the gentle race of the Towara. 5 

As we pass from the Desert to its inhabitants, a question 
naturally arises—How far can we be sure that we have the 
same outlines, and colours, and forms, that were presented 
to those who wandered through these mountains and valleys 


1 1 Chron. xxi. 29; 2 Chron. i. 3. 

2 See p. 82, and Appendix. 

3 See Chapter V. 


4 Exodus xviii. 7. 

5 Ritter, Sinai, pp. 936, 937. 


PENINSULA OP SINAI. 


25 




three thousand years ago 1 It might at first sight seem, 
that in this, as in other respects, the interest of the Desert 
of Sinai would be unique ; that here, more than in any 
other great stage of historical events, the outward scene 
must remain precisely as it was ; that the convent of 
Justinian with its gardens, the ruins of Paran, with the 
remains of hermits’ cells long since desolate, are the only 
alterations which human hands have introduced into these 
wild solitudes. Even the Egyptian monuments and 
sculptures which are carved out of the sandstone rocks, 
were already there, as the Israelites passed by— 
memorials at once of their servitude and of their 
deliverance. But a difficulty has often been stated that 
renders it necessary somewhat to modify this assump¬ 
tion of absolute identity between the ancient and 
modern Desert. The question is asked—“ How could a 
tribe, so numerous and powerful as, on any hypothesis, 
the Israelites must have been, 1 be maintained in this 
inhospitable desert \ ” It is no answer to say that they 
were sustained by miracles ; for except the manna, the 
quails, and the three interventions in regard to water, 
none such are mentioned in the Mosaic history ; and if 
we have no warrant to take away, we have no warrant 
to add. Nor is it any answer to say that this difficulty 
is a proof of the impossibility, and therefore of the 
unhistorical character of the narrative. For, as Ewald 
has well shown, the general truth of the wanderings 
in the wilderness is an essential preliminary to the 
whole of the subsequent history of Israel. Something, of 
course, may be allowed for the spread of the tribes of 
Israel far and wide through the whole peninsula; some¬ 
thing, also, for the constant means of support from their 
own flocks and herds. More, also, might be elicited 
than has yet been done, from the undoubted fact that a 
population nearly if not quite equal to the whole permanent 

1 In spite of the difficulties attending Oriental calculation, in this case the 
upon the statement of the 600,000 most recent and the most critical in¬ 
armed men, as given in the Pentateuch, vestigation of this history inclines to 
and the uncertainty always attached adopt the numbers of 600,000 as au¬ 
to attaining exact statements of num- thentic. Ewald, Geschichte, (2nd edit.) 
bers in any ancient text, or in any ii. 61, 253, 359. 





SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


26 

population of the Peninsula does actually pass through the 
Desert, in the caravan of the five thousand African pilgrims 
on their way to Mecca. It is, of course, a number incom¬ 
parably less than that ascribed to the Israelites, and 
passing only for a few days, but still it shows what may 
be done for a large addition to the habitual population of 
the country, even when traversing a portion of the Desert 
(the Tih) far less available for resources of life than the 
mountains of Sinai. Yet it must be acknowledged that 
none of these considerations solve the difficulty, though 
they mitigate its force. It is therefore important to 
observe what indications there may be of the moun¬ 
tains of Sinai having ever been able to furnish greater 
resources than at present. These indications are well 
summed up by Hitter. 1 There is no doubt that the 
vegetation of the wadys has considerably decreased. 
In part, this would be an inevitable effect of the violence 
of the winter torrents. The trunks of palm-trees washed 
up on the shore of the Dead Sea, from which the living 
tree has now for many centuries disappeared, show what 
may have been the devastation produced amongst those 
mountains, where the floods, especially in earlier times, 
must have been violent to a degree unknown in Palestine ; 
whilst the peculiar cause—the impregnation of salt— 
which has preserved the vestiges of the older vegetation 
there, has here, of course, no existence. The traces of 
such a destruction were pointed out to Burckhardt on the 
eastern side of Mount Sinai, 2 as having occurred within 
half a century before his visit; also to Wellsted, 3 as having 
occurred near Tor, in 1832. In part, the same result has 
followed from the reckless waste of the Bedouin tribes— 
reckless in destroying, and careless in replenishing. A 
fire, a pipe, lit under a grove of Desert trees, may clear 
away the vegetation of a whole valley. So Laborde 
observed, 4 to justify his preference of the Wady Useit 
to the Wady Ghurundel as the site of Elim, against the 
objection that there were fewer palms in the former than 

1 Ritter, Sinai, pp. 926, 927. There is 2 Burckhardt, p. 538. 
a chapter on the same subj ect in the first 3 Wellsted, ii., 15. 

volume of Captain Allen’s “ Dead Sea.” 4 Commentary on Exodus, p. 85. 


PENINSULA OF SINAI. 


27 


in the latter. The truth of his remark is amply confirmed 
by the fact, that, in the few years which have elapsed 
since his visit, the case is reversed. There may, perhaps, 
be not more palms at Useit than in Laborde’s time, but 
there are fewer at Ghurundel; 1 and no one now who was 
guided by the wish to choose the larger palm-grove could 
hesitate to select Useit. Again, it is mentioned by Ruppell, 
that the acacia trees have been of late years ruthlessly 
destroyed by the Bedouins for the sake of charcoal; espe¬ 
cially since they have been compelled by the Pasha of Egypt 
to pay a tribute in charcoal for an assault committed on 
the Mecca caravan in the year 1823. 2 Charcoal from the 
acacia is, in fact, the chief, perhaps it might be said the 
only, traffic of the Peninsula. Camels are constantly met, 
loaded with this wood, on the way between Cairo and 
Suez. And as this probably has been carried on in 
great degree by the monks of the convent, it may 
account for the fact, that whereas in the valleys of 
the western and the eastern clusters this tree abounds 
more or less, yet in the central cluster itself, to which 
modern tradition certainly, and geographical considera¬ 
tions probably, point as the mountain of the burning 
“ thorn,” and the scene of the building of the Ark 
and all the utensils of the Tabernacle from this very 
wood, there is now not a single acacia to be seen. If 
this be so, the greater abundance of vegetation would, as 
is well known, have furnished a greater abundance 
of water, and this again would re-act on the vegetation, 
from which the means of subsistence would be procured. 
How much may be done by a careful use of such water 
and such soil as the Desert supplies, may be seen by the 
only two spots to which, now, a diligent and provident 
attention is paid; namely, the gardens at the Wells of 
Moses, under the care of the French and English agents 
from Suez, and the gardens in the valleys of Gebel 
Mousa, under the care of the Greek monks of the convent 
of St. Catherine. Even as late as the seventeenth century, 
if we may trust the expression of Monconys, 3 the Wady Er- 

1 In 1853 I counted twenty at Useit, and six at Ghurundel. See Part II. iv. 

2 Ruppell, p. 190. 3 Journal des Voy., p. 420. 









28 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


Raheh in front of the convent, now entirely bare, was “ a 
vast green plain,”—“ une grande champagne verte .” And 
that there was in ancient times a greater population than 
at present—which would, again, by thus furnishing heads 
and hands to consider and to cultivate these spots of 
vegetation, tend to increase and to preserve them—may 
be inferred from several indications . 1 The Amalekites 
who contested the passage of the Desert with Israel were, 
—if we may draw any inferences from this very fact, as 
well as from their wide-spread name and power even to 
the time of Saul and David, and from the allusion to them 
in Balaam’s prophecy as “the first of the nations,”— 
something more than a mere handful of Bedouins. 
The Egyptian copper-mines, and monuments, and 
hieroglyphics, in Sarbut-el-Kedem and the Wady Megara, 
imply a degree of intercourse between Egypt and 
the Peninsula in the earliest days of Egypt, of which all 
other traces have long ceased. The ruined cities of Edom 
in the mountains east of the ’Arabah, and the remains and 
history of Petra itself, indicate a traffic and a population 
in these remote regions which now seems to us almost 


1 In the question of the mainte¬ 
nance of the Israelites, it is impossible 
to avoid considering the question of 
the identity of the present manna with 
that described in the Mosaic history. 
The hypothesis of their identity, it 
must be remembered, is no modern 
fancy; but was believed by Josephus 
(Ant. iii. 2) and has always been main¬ 
tained by the Greek Church in its 
representatives at the Convent of St. 
Catherine; and portions of it have been 
by them deliberately sold as such to 
pilgrims and travellers for many cen¬ 
turies. It must be acknowledged, with 
all deference to so ancient a tradition, 
that the only arguments in its favour 
are the name and the locality in which 
it is found. An exudation like honey, 
produced by insects from the leaves of 
the tamarisk, used only for medicinal 
purposes, and falling on the ground only 
from accident or neglect, and at present 
produced in sufficient quantities only to 
support one man for six months, has 
obviously but few points of similarity 
with the “ small round thing, small as 


the hoarfrost on the ground ; like cori¬ 
ander seed, white, its taste like wafers 
made with honey; gathered and ground 
in mills, and beat in a mortar , baked 
in pans and made into calces, and its 
taste as the taste of fresh oil; ” and 
spokeu of as forming at least a consi¬ 
derable part of the sustenance of a 
vast caravan like that of the Israelites. 
All the arguments in favour of the 
ancient view of the identity may be seen 
in Ritter (pp. 665—695), all those in 
favour of the modern view of the 
diversity of the two kinds of manna, in 
Robinson (vol. i. p. 170) and Laborde 
(Commentary on Exodus and Numbers, 
p. 97). So far as the argument against 
its identity depends on its insufficiency, 
the greater abundance of vegetation, 
and therefore of tarfa trees, should 
be taken into account. And it should 
be observed, that tl^p manna found in 
Kurdistan and Persia far more nearly 
corresponds to the Mosaic account, 
and also is asserted by the Bedouins 
and others to fall fresh from heaven. 
(Wellsted, ii., 48.) 



PENINSULA OF SINAI. 


29 


inconceivable. And even in much later times,—in the 
fourth and fifth centuries of our era — the writings of 
Christian pilgrims on the rocks, whether in the Sinaitic 
characters, in Greek, or in Arabic ; as well as the numerous 
remains of cells, gardens, houses, chapels, and churches, 
now deserted and ruined, both in the neighbourhood of 
Gebel Mousa and of Serbal, all show that even the Desert 
was not always the dreary waste that it is now. Whether 
these changes are sufficient to explain the difficulty in 
answer to which they are alleged, may be doubtful. But 
they at least help to meet it, and they must under any 
circumstances be borne in mind, to modify in some degree 
the image which we form to ourselves of the scenes of the 
Israelite history. 

III. And now, is it possible to descend into details, and 
to ascertain the route by which the Israelites passed— 
over the Red Sea, and then through the Desert to 
Palestine ? First, can we be guided by tradition % In other 
words, has the recollection of those past events formed 
part of the historical consciousness and tradition of the 
Desert, or has it been merely devised in later times from 
conjectures either of the Greek monks and hermits of 
Sinai speculating on the words of the Old Testament, or 
of the Bedouin chiefs applying here and there a fragment 
of their knowledge of the Koran % Such a question can 
only be authoritatively answered by a traveller who, with 
a complete knowledge of Arabic, has sifted and com¬ 
pared the various legends and stories of the several tribes 
of the Peninsula. But any one, by combining his own 
experience, however slight, with the accounts of previous 
travellers, especially of Burckhardt, may form an approxi¬ 
mation to the truth. From whatever date it may be 
derived, there is unquestionably a general atmosphere of 
Mosaic tradition everywhere. From Petra to Cairo— 
from the northern platform of the Peninsula to its 
southern extremity, the name and the story of Moses is 
still predominant. There are the two groups of “Wells 
of Moses,” one on each side the Gulf of Suez—there are 
the “ Baths of Pharaoh ”—and the “ Baths of Moses 
farther down the coast; there is the “ Seat of Moses,” near 


Local tra¬ 
ditions 
of the 
history. 


1. Arab 
tradition. 


Traditions 
of Moses. 


30 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


Loss of the 

ancient 

names. 


Bisatin, and in the Wady Feiran ; there is the “ Mountain 
of Moses” in the cluster of Sinai; the “Cleft of Moses” 
in Mount St. Catherine ; the “ Valley” and the “ Cleft of 
Moses,” at Petra ; the “ Island of Pharaoh,” or of “ Moses,” 
in the Gulf of ’Akaba. There is the romantic story told to 
Burckhardt, 1 that the soughing of wind down the Pass of 
Nuweybi’a, on that gulf, is the wailing of Moses as he leaves 
his loved mountains ; there is the “ Hill of Aaron,” at the 
base of the traditional Horeb ; the “ Tomb of Aaron,” at 
the summit of the “ Mountain of Aaron,” overhanging 
Petra. It is possible, too, that the plateau of the Tih, 
or of the “ Wanderings,” on the north of the Peninsula, 
—the valley of the Tih, with the Mountain of Gheiboun 
(Doubt), on the southern road from Cairo to Suez— 
and the Gebel 'Attaka, or Mountain of Deliverance, 
between that valley and Suez, have reference to the wan¬ 
derings and the escape of Israel. But these latter names 
may perhaps have originated in the dangers and deliver¬ 
ances of the Mecca pilgrimage. 

Two circumstances throw doubt on the continuity of 
this tradition. The first is, that hardly in one instance 
do the actual localities bear the names preserved in the 
Old Testament. These names are frequent and precise. 
The different regions of the Desert which are indicated 
by their natural features, as above described, all seem to 
have had their special nomenclatures. All these as 
general names have perished. One name only, that of 
Paran, has lingered in the valley and city of that name 
—apparently the same as that corrupted into Feirdn; 
just as the name of Hellas is preserved only in a solitary 
hamlet on the banks of the Sperchius in Thessaly. 
The names of the particular stations which are given both 
in the general narrative, and in the special enumera¬ 
tion in the 33rd chapter of the Book of Numbers, have 
also disappeared. There are three possible exceptions : 
the defile of Muktala may he a corruption of Migdol; 
Ajerood of Pi-hahiroth; Haderah of Hazeroth. But these 
are all doubtful, and of the others, even of the most 
celebrated, Marah, Elim, and Bephidim, no trace remains. 


1 Burckhardt, p. 517 For the present Mussulman traditions, see Note A. 


PENINSULA OF SINAI. 


31 


More remarkable still, perhaps, if we did not remember 
how very rarely mountains retain their nomenclature from 
age to age, is the disappearance of the names of Horeb 
and Sinai . 1 What was the original meaning or special 
appropriation of these two names it is difficult to de¬ 
termine . 2 “Horeb'’ is probably the “Mountain of the 
Dried-up Ground ; ” “ Sinai ” the “ Mountain of the 
Thorn.” Either name applies, therefore, almost equally 
to the general aspect or to the general vegetation of 
the whole range. But both are now superseded by the 
fanciful appellations which attach to each separate peak, 
or by the common name of “ Tor,” in which all are 
merged alike. 

The names now given to the mountains, as before 
observed, are chiefly derived either from the adjacent 
wadys, or from their peculiar vegetation. Some few are 
called from some natural peculiarity, such as Gebel 
Hammam, so called from the warm springs at its 
foot ; or Tast Sudr, from its cuplike shape. Some, 
however, both of the wadys and the mountains, are 
called from legendary or historical events attached to 
them. Such are the Wady Es-Sheykh,—the central valley 
of the Peninsula, which derives its name from the tomb of 
Sheykh Saleh ; 3 the Gebel-el-Banat—the “ Mountain of 
the Damsels,” so called from a story of two Bedouin 
sisters having, in a fit of disappointed love, twisted 
their hair together, and leaped from the two peaks 


1 One of tlxe most intelligent guides 
I ever saw in any mountain country 
—Sheykh Zeddan, Sheykh of Serbal, 
—who accompanied us to the top of 
that mountain, was wholly unac¬ 
quainted with the names of Horeb and 
Sinai; and this seemed to be the gene¬ 
ral rule. But it must be observed, that 
in Niebuhr’s time the Arabs spoke of 
the whole cluster now called “ Tor ” as 
“Tor Sina” (Description de l’Arabie, 
p. 200); and the little Arab guides of 
the convent (as will be noticed after¬ 
wards, see p. 42) gave to one particular 
peak the name of “Sena.” 

2 The special use of “ Horeb ” and 

“ Sinai ” in the Old Testament has 
often been discussed. It appears to me 
that this depends rather on a distinc¬ 


tion of usage than of place. 1. In 
Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers, Sinai 
is always and exclusively used for the 
scene of the Giving of the Law ; Horeb 
being only used twice—for the scene of 
the Burning Bush, and of the Striking 
of the Rock. (Ex. iii. 1, xvii. 6, are 
doubtful; Ex. xxxiii. 6, is ambiguous.) 
2. In Deuteronomy, Horeb is substituted 
for Sinai, the former being always used, 
the latter never, for the Mountain of 
the Law. 3. In the Psalms, the two 
are used indifferently for the Mountain 
of the Law. 4. In 1 Kings xix. 8, it is 
impossible to determine to what part, 
if to any special part, Horeb is applied. 
For a further discussion of the subject, 
see Lepsius’ Letters, p. 317. 

3 See p. 56; Part II. p. 79. 


Modern 

names. 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


of the mountain, which, in all probability, originated the 
legend ; Gebel-Katherin, or Mountain of St. Catherine, the 
scene of the miraculous translation of the body of that 
saint from Alexandria. This nomenclature suggests 
the likelihood that the various names before mentioned in 
connection with the Mosaic history are comparatively 
modern. If the monks of the convent have been able 
so completely to stamp the name of St. Catherine on one of 
their peaks, there is no reason to doubt that they may have 
been equally able to stamp the name of Moses on the other. 1 

But, secondly, the moment that the Arab traditions 
of Moses are examined in detail, they are too fantastic to 
be treated seriously. They may well be taken as repre¬ 
senting some indistinct or mysterious impression left by 
that colossal figure as he passed before the vision of 
their ancestors. But it is not possible to apply them for 
verification of special events or localities. The passage 
of the Red Sea, as Niebuhr has well remarked, is fixed 
wherever the traveller puts the question to his Arab 
guides. The “Wells of Moses,” the “Baths of Pharaoh,” 
the “ Baths of Moses,” all down the Gulf of Suez, and the 
“ Island of Pharaoh,” in the Gulf of 5 Akaba, equally derive 
their names from traditions of the passage at each of 
these particular spots. The “ warm springs of Pharaoh ” 
are his last breath as the waves past over him; the “ Wells 
of Moses,” the “ Baths of Moses,” the great “ Clefts of 
Moses ” on St. Catherine, and at Petra, are equally the 
results of Moses 5 rod. The “ Mountain of Moses 55 is so 
called, not so much from any tradition of the Giving of the 
Law, as because it is supposed to contain in the cavity of 
the granite rock the impression of his back, as he hid 
himself from the presence of God. His visit to Sinai is 
apparently separated from that of the Children of 
Israel, who, according to the Bedouin story, occupied 

1 At the same time it is impossible Greece, the place would long before 
not to remark the much greater slow- this have received the name which 
ness with which foreign traditions travellers and guides are anxious to im- 
strike root here than would be the case pose upon it. But here, in spite of the 
in Europe. Since Burckhardt’s time, endeavours made by every party that 
the spring of How&ra has been gene- passes to extract a confession of the 
rally assumed to be Marah. Had this desired name, “ Howara” it still is, and 
spring been in England, Italy, or probably will remain. 


PENINSULA OF SINAI. 


33 


the whole forty years in vainly endeavouring to cross the 
platform of the Tih. 

If the Arab tradition fails in establishing particular 
localities, so does also the Greek tradition as preserved in 
the convent. How far in earlier times the monks were 
better guides than they are at present, it is difficult 
to determine. At present, and as far back as the 
modern race of travellers extends, there is probably no 
branch of the vast fraternity of ciceroni so unequal to their 
task as the twenty-one monks of the most interesting 
convent in the world. Exiles from the islands in the 
Greek Archipelago ; rebels against monastic rules at 
home ; lunatics sent for recovery ; none as a general rule 
remaining longer than two or three years; with an 
imperfect knowledge of Arabic, with no call upon their 
exertions, and no check upon their ignorance, they know 
less about the localities which surround them than the 
humblest of the Bedouin serfs who wait upon their bounty. 
It may be said, perhaps, that for this very reason, they 
may have the more faithfully handed down the traditions 
of the first inhabitants of the convent. Yet, when we 
remember how many of these sites have evidently been 
selected for the sake of convenience rather than of truth, 
it is not easy to trust a tradition that has descended 
through such channels even for fifteen hundred years, 
unless it can render good its claim to be the offspring of 
another, which requires for its genuineness another fifteen 
hundred still. In order to bring it into the round of the 
daily sights, the cleft of Korah, Dathan, and Abiram, is 
transferred from Kadesh Barnea to the foot of Horeb. The 
peak of Gebel Mousa, now pointed out by them as the scene 
of the giving of the Law, fails to meet the most pressing 
requirements of the narrative. Rephidim has been always 
shown within an hour’s walk instead of a day’s march 
from the mountain. The monks in the last century con¬ 
fessed or rather boasted that they had themselves invented 
the footmark of Mahomet’s mule, in order to secure 
the devotion of the Bedouins. The cypress, surmounted 
by a cross, and cut into the shape of a serpent, in the 
court of the convent, in all probability was intended to 


2. Greek 
traditions. 


34 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


3. Early 
traditions, 


of Eusebius 
and 

Jerome ; 


and re¬ 
specting 
Mount Hor, 


and Jethro. 


commemorate the really remote event of the erection of 
the Brazen Serpent . 1 Tor, and even ’Akaba, were long 
shown as Elim . 2 

There are, however, some few traces of traditions ex¬ 
tending beyond the age of Justinian, or of Mahomet, which 
ought not to be disregarded. Josephus, here as elsewhere, 
refers throughout to sources of information not contained 
in the Old Testament, yet free from the grotesqueness and 
absurdity of the Rabbinical interpretations. Eusebius and 
Jerome also speak as if the nomenclature of the Desert 3 
was in some instances known to them, either by tradition 
or conjecture. The selection of the sites of the two great 
convents of Feiran and St. Catherine, though it may 
have been dictated in part by the convenience of 
the neighbouring water and vegetation, yet must also 
have been in part influenced by a pre-existing belief in 
the sanctity of those spots. One point there is,— 
not, indeed, in the Peninsula itself, but in connection with 
the route of the Israelites—in which the local tradition so 
remarkably coincides with every indication furnished by 
historical notices, and by the nature of the country, as 
not only to vindicate credibility for itself, but to lend some 
authority to the traditions of the Desert generally— 
the “ Mountain of Aaron,” in all probability the “ Hor ” of 
Aaron’s grave . 4 The cycle of Mosaic names and tradi¬ 
tions, which seems most reasonably to point to a genuine 
Arab source, is that which relates to the Arab chief 
Jethro, or (as he is called from his other name “ Chobab ”) 


1 This observation I owe to the accu¬ 
rate drawing of the convent by my 
friend Mr. Herbert Herries. 

2 Wellsted (ii., 13) says that “the 
traditions of the country assert Tor 
to be Elim, where Moses and his 
household encamped;” and “that the 

Mohamedan pilgrims proceeding to or 
returning from Mecca give implicit 
credence to the tradition,” and “be¬ 
lieve the waters to be efficacious in 
removing cutaneous and other tropical 
disorders.” This shows the importance 

of an accurate distinction of the differ¬ 
ent classes of tradition. There is no 
doubt that the Mussulmans regard the 
wells as the Baths of Moses; but the 


question is, whether they regard them 
as Elim, or whether, as is probable, 
that is not a name given by the Greek 
convent, to which the palm-grove of 
Tor belongs. 

3 At the same time the rash conjecture 
that Jerome makes about the second 
encampment by the Red Sea, (Numb, 
xxxiii. 10) shows that he was quite un¬ 
acquainted with the details of the geo¬ 
graphy. He speaks of it as a great 
difficulty, and solves it by imagining 
that there was a bay running inland, or 
that a pool of water with reeds (!) may 
possibly have been the Reedy Sea. (Ep. 
ad Fabiolam.) 

4 Se9 Part II. xvi. 


PENINSULA OF SINAI. 


35 


Shouaib. The most remarkable of these is the Wady 
Shouaib; according to one version, the valley east of Gebel 
Mousa, in which the convent stands ; according to another, 
the ravine leading down into that valley from the Has 
Sasafeh. Probably the W&dy Leja on the western side 
of the same range, and the Gebel Fureia above the plain 
Er-raheh, point to the two daughters of Jethro, 1 called in 
the Arabian legends Lija and Safuria (Zipporah). There 
is also the cave of Shouaib 2 on the eastern shores of the 
Gulf of ’Akaba, a tradition the more remarkable as being 
by its situation removed from any connection with the 
Christian convents, and also being the very region which, 
in all probability, is the country described as Jethro’s 
Midian in the Pentateuch. 

IV. Bearing these earliest traditions in mind, when¬ 
ever they can be traced, it may still be possible, by the 
internal evidence of the country itself, to lay down not 
indeed the actual route of the Israelites in every stage, but, 
in almost all cases, the main alternatives between which we 
must choose, and, in some cases, the very spots themselves. 
Hitherto no one traveller has traversed more than one, 
or at most two routes of the Desert; and thus the 
determination of these questions has been obscured, first, 
by the tendency of every one to make the Israelites 
follow his own track, and secondly, by his inability to 
institute a just comparison between the facilities or the 
difficulties which attend the routes which he has not seen. 
This obscurity will always exist till some competent 
traveller has explored the whole Peninsula. When this 
has been fairly done, there is little doubt that some of the 
most important topographical questions now at issue will 
be set at rest. Meanwhile, with the materials before us, 
it may be useful to give a summary of the points in 
dispute as they at present stand. 3 

1. The passage of the Red Sea, has been extended, as 


1 See Weil’s Biblical Legends, p. 107. consistent with perspicuity. The map 

2 Itinerary of Mecca Pilgrims in must be in many cases its own in- 

Welsted’s “ Arabia,” ii., 459. terpreter. I must also refer to the 

3 In all that follows I have confined subsequent portion of this Chapter 

myself to the most concise statement (Part II.) 


Route 
of the Is¬ 
raelites. 


1. The pas¬ 
sage of the 
Red Sea. 


36 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


already observed, by the Arab traditions down the whole 
Gulf of Suez, and even to the Gulf of 'Akaba. 1 But it 
may, for all practical purposes, be confined to two points 
—the Wady Tuarik, opposite the Wells of Moses ; or the 
immediate neighbourhood of Suez ; whether at the pre¬ 
sent fords, or at some point higher up the gulf which 
then, doubtless, extended further northward. In favour 
of the former locality, besides the usual Arab tradition, 
there is the earlier statement of Josephus that the start 
was made from Latopolis, which he identifies with the 
Egyptian Babylon, that is, Old Cairo. If they started 
from this city, standing almost at the entrance of the 
valley which opens on the southern point of passage, 
the great probability is that they would have followed 
that course throughout. This, perhaps, is the chief 
argument in favour of the theory of the southern pas¬ 
sage. But the traditions of Josephus can hardly weigh 
against those 2 of the Alexandrine translators, who make 
the departure to be from some point in the Delta in 
the neighbourhood of Heroopolis. 3 And, in all other 
points, the words of the narrative almost imperatively 
require the shallower, the narrower, and therefore the 
more northern, passage. If the “ strong east wind,” 
or, according to the Septuagint, “ the strong south 4 
wind,” was used to part the waters, we must select a 
portion of the sea whose depth is not too great 
to forbid the agency of wind; and this can only be at 
the northern end, where the shoals are, and must always 
have been, sufficient to render a shallower passage 
possible. If the passage of 600,000 armed men was 


1 The best representation of the con¬ 
flicting theories is given in the map of 
Laborde’s Commentary on Exodus and 
Numbers. For the general scene, see 
Part II. ii. 2, 3. 

2 Josephus, Ant., II. xv. 1. 

3 Compare Ex. xii. 37,—“they de¬ 
parted from Raineses,”—with Gen. xlvi. 
28,—“ to Heroopolis in the land of Ra- 
meses” (LXX.). See also the almost 
conclusive arguments by which Lepsius 
decides the identity of Abu-Kesheb with 
Raineses. (Letters, p. 438. Bohn’s Ed.) 

4 N dry, Ex. xiv. 21. The effect of 


the winds in the Red Sea is well given 
by Wellsted, (ii. 42, 470.) Compare 
Clarke, i., 324, on the power of the 
wind to dry up the Sea of Azof, 
though five fathoms deep; and King’s 
Morsels of Criticism, i. 285 (quoted 
in Bagster’s Comprehensive Bible, on 
Joshua iii.), who mentions the strong 
south-west wind which amongst other 
like events in 1645 blew the bed of 
the Rhone dry. See also a learned 
dissertation on the “wind” in the 
Journal of Sacred Literature, vol. viii. 

p. 108. 


PENINSULA OP SINAI. 


37 


effected in the limits of a single night, we are compelled 
to look for it in the narrower end of the gulf, and not in 
the wide interval of eight or ten miles between the Wady 
Tuarik and the Wells of Moses. 1 Indeed, it should be 
remembered that the notion of the Israelites crossing the 
Red Sea at its broader part is comparatively modern. 

By earlier Christian commentators, and by almost all the 
Rabbinical writers who selected the wider road as the 
scene of the event, the passage was explained to be not a 
transit —which, as a learned Dutch interpreter calculated, 
would have required at least three days—but a short 
circuit , returning again to the Egyptian shore, and then 
pursuing their way round the head of the Gulf. Such an 
interpretation, faithfully represented on the old maps, and 
defended at great length by Quaresmius, 2 is worth pre¬ 
serving, as a curious instance of the sacrifice of the whole 
moral grandeur of a miracle, to which men are often (and 
in this case necessarily) driven by a mistaken desire of 
exaggerating its physical magnitude. 

2. There can be no dispute as to the general track of 2. Marah 
the Israelites after the passage. If they were to enter the and Ehm * 
mountains at all they must continue in the route of all 
travellers, between the sea and the tableland of the Tih, 

till they entered the low hills of Ghurundel. Marah 
must be either Howara 3 or Ghurundel. Elim must be 
Ghurundel, Useit, or Tayibeh. 4 

3. The “ encampment by the Red Sea” (Numbers xxxiii. 3. Encamp 
10) must almost certainly be at the descent of the Wady 
Tayibeh on the sea, or in some portion of the plain of Sea. 
Murka, before they again turned up into the mountains ; 

the cliffs forbidding any continuous line of march along 
the shore between the Wady Ghurundel and the Wady 
Tayibeh. It is indeed just possible that, like Pococke and 
Bartlett, they may have descended to the mouth of the 


1 Thi 3 is the width according to the Tih el 'Amara, right (i. e. south) of 

survey of the Red Sea by Commander Howara, so bitter that neither men nor 
Moresby and Lieutenant Careless. camels could drink of it. From hence 

2 Elucidatio Terrse Sanct8e,ii., 965,&c. the road goes straight to Wady 

3 Dr. Graul, however, was told that Ghurundel. (Vol. ii., p. 254.) 

Tuweileb (the well-known Sheykh of 4 See Part II. p. 68. 

the Tow&ra tribe) knew of a spring near 


38 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


4. Wilder¬ 
ness of Sin. 


5. Choice 
between 
Serbal and 
Gebel 
Mousa as 
Sinai. 


Wady Ghurundel, by the warm springs (“of Pharaoh”), 
and .then returned to the Wady Useit. Such a detour 
is not likely : yet it must be borne in mind as possible. 
For if the “ encampment by the Red Sea ” was at the 
mouth of the Wady Ghurundel, it must have been before 
the bifurcation of the two routes to Gebel Mousa—that 
namely to the north by Sarbut-el-Kedem, and that to 
the south by Wady Tayibeh—and would thus open the 
alternative of their having gone by the former of these 
two roads, and so avoided altogether the Wady Feiran. 
This is a material point in favour of all views which 
exclude Mount Serbal from the history. If, on the 
other hand, they proceeded, as travellers usually do, by 
Ghurundel, Useit, and Tayibeh, (and if Tayibeh or Useit 
be Elim, they must have done so) and thus descended on 
the sea, here two other alternatives open upon us. 

4. For when arrived at the plain of Murka, they may 
have gone, according to the route of the older travellers,— 
Shaw, Pococke, and the Prefect of the Franciscan Convent, 
—to Tor, and thence by the Wady Hebran, and the Nakb 
Howy, to Gebel Mousa ; or they may have gone, according 
to the route of all recent travellers, by the Wady Shellal, 
the ISlakb Badera, and the Wadys Mokatteb, Feiran, and 
Es-Sheykh, to the same point. The former route is impro¬ 
bable, both because of its detour, and also because the 
Wady Hebran is said to be, and the Nakb Howy certainly is, 
as difficult if not more difficult than any pass on the route 
of the Wady Feiran. If it might seem to be in its favour 
that it was the habitual route of the early travellers, 
before the newly-awakened love of scenery had induced 
any one to visit the Wady Feiran, yet it must be remem¬ 
bered that all early travellers went and returned from 
Cairo to Sinai, and consequently took one route on their 
egress and the other on their regress. Still it must be 
borne in mind as a possible alternative. 

5. Of the three routes just mentioned, which we may 
call the northern, the central, and the southern, the 
northern and the southern combine in this result, that 
they omit Mount Serbal, and necessarily take the Israelites 
to Gebel Mousa, or at least some mountain in the 


PENINSULA OP SINAI. 


39 


eastern extremity of the peninsula. But the central 
route, after leaving the plain of Murka, mounts by 
the successive stages of the Wady Shellal, the Nakb 
Badera, and the Wady Mokatteb, to the Wady Feiran and 
its great mountain, Serbal, the pride of this cluster. 
If, as is most probable for the reasons just assigned, the 
Israelites took this road, the question is at once opened 
whether Serbal be the Sinai of the Exodus ? If it be, 
then we are here arrived at the end of their journey. If, on 
the other hand, the Israelites could be shown to have 
taken the northern or the southern road, or if there are 
insuperable objections to the identification of Serbal 
with Sinai, the end is to be sought where it has usually 
been found, in the cluster of Gebel Mousa. Between these 
two clusters the question must lie. 1 

Each has its natural recommendations, which will best 
appear on proceeding. The claims of tradition are very 
nearly equal. Gebel Mousa is now the only one which 
puts forward any pretensions to be considered as the place, 
and is indeed the only region of the Sinaitic mountains 
where any traditions can be said to linger. They are 
certainly as old as the 6 th century : and they probably 
reach back still further. On the other hand, though 
Serbal has in later times lost its historical name, in 
earlier ages it enjoyed a larger support of tradition than 
Gebel Mousa. This, at least, is the natural inference 
from the Sinaitic inscriptions, which, of whatever date, 
must be prior to the age of Justinian, founder of the 
Convent of St. Catherine ; and which are found at the very 
top of the mountain and the ruined edifice on its central 
summit. This too is the impression conveyed by the 
existence of the episcopal city of Paran, at its foot, which 
also existed prior to the foundations of Justinian. And 
the description of Horeb by Josephus 2 as a mountain, 

1 Till Um-Shomer has been tho- and there are strange stories of sounds 
roughly explored it would be rash to like thunder. (Burckhardt, 586—588.) 
discard entirely the highest point of These points agree to a certain extent 
the peninsula. It was ascended by with the scriptural indications of Sinai, 
Burckhardt to within 200 feet of the yet it is so far removed from any con- 
summit, which is white. The plain ceivable track of the Israelites as to 
of El-K&’a is immediately below. render its claims highly improbable. 
There is a spring and fig-trees, the 2 Jos. Ant. II. xii. 1. 
ruins of a convent (Deir Antous), 


40 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


“ the highest of the region,” “ with good grass growing 
round it,” is more like the impression that is produced on 
a traveller by Serbal than that derived from any other 
mountain usually seen in the range. It was undoubtedly 
identified with Sinai by Eusebius, Jerome, and Cosmas ; 
that is, by all known writers till the time of Justinian. 
Ruppell also asserts that the summit of Serbal was regarded 
by the Bedouins who accompanied him, as a sacred place, to 
which at certain times they brought sacrifices. 1 

There remains the question, whether there is any 
solution of the rival claims of Serbal and Gebel Mousa, 
which can give to each a place in the sacred history. 
Such an attempt has been made by Ritter, who, with 
his usual union of diffidence and learning, suggests 
the possibility that Serbal may have been “ the Mount 
of God,” 2 the sanctuary of the heathen tribes of the 
Desert,—already sacred before Israel came, and that to 
which Pharaoh would understand that they were going 
their long journey into the Wilderness for sacrifice. It 
may then have been the Wady Feiran that witnessed 
the battle of Rephidim, 3 the building of the Altar on the 
hill, and the visit of Jethro, and after this long pause, in 
“ the third month,” they may again have moved forward 
to “ Sinai,” the cluster of Gebel Mousa. There are two 
points gained by any such solution ; first, that Sinai may 
then be identified with Gebel Mousa, without the difficulty, 
otherwise considerable, that the narrative brings the 
Israelites through the two most striking features of the 
Desert—Wady Feiran and Serbal—without any notice of 
the fact; and, secondly that it gives a scene, at least in 
some respects well-suited, for the encampment at Rephi¬ 
dim, the most remarkable which occurred before the final 

1 For the comparison of all these water in a spot where Israel is de¬ 

arguments in favour of Serb&l, see scribed as wanting water. But thi 3 
Lepsius’ Letters (Bohn), pp. 310—321, applies even more to any spot in the 
556—562. I have been unwilling to neighbourhood of Gebel Mousa. Graul 
enter into more detail than was neces- (vol. ii., 256) suggests that the brook 
sary to give a general view of the ques- of Feiran may (by a fallen rock) have 
tion at issue. See Part II. vii. been subsequently diverted into its 

2 Exodus iii. 1; iv. 27. present course ; or, that it may have 

3 Ritter, Sinai, pp. 728—744. If been dry, as it was when he saw it 
Feiran be Rephidim, one serious diffi- (March 9th, 1853). 

culty arises from the abundance of 


PENINSULA OF SINAI. 


41 


one in front of Sinai itself. How far the narrative itself 
contains sufficient grounds for such a distinction between 
the two mountains is, in our present state of knowledge, 
very uncertain. If “ Horeb” be taken for the generic name 
of the whole range, and not necessarily as identical with 
Sinai, then there is only one passage left (Exod. xxiv. 13, 
16) in which, in the present text, “the Mount of God” is 
identified with “ Sinai;” and even if Horeb be identified 
with Sinai, yet the variations of the Septuagint on this 
point show how easily the title of one mountain might be 
assumed into the text as the title of the other after the 
distinction between the two had been forgotten. In Exod. 
iii. 1, where “the Mountain of God” occurs in the present 
Hebrew text, it is omitted in the LXX, (though not in the 
Alexandrian MS.;) as in Exod. xix. 3, where it occurs in the 
LXX, it is omitted by the Hebrew text. This would agree 
well with the slight topographical details of the battle. 
In every passage where Sinai, and Horeb, and the Mount 
of God, and Mount Paran are spoken of, the Hebrew 
word “Hor” for “mountain” is invariably 1 used. Butin 
Exod. xvii. 9, 10, in the account of the battle of Rephidim, 
the word used is “ Gibeah,” rightly translated “ hill.” 
Every one who has seen the valley of Feiran will at once 
recognise the propriety of the term, if applied to the rocky 
eminence which commands the palm-grove, and on which, 
in early Christian times, stood the church and palace of 
the Bishops of Paran. Thus if we can attach any credence 
to the oldest known tradition of the Peninsula, that 
Rephidim is the same as Paran, then Rephidim, “the 
resting-place,” is the natural name for the paradise of 
the Bedouins in the adjacent palm-grove ; then the hill 
of the Church of Paran may fairly be imagined to be 
“the hill” on which Moses stood, deriving its earliest 
consecration from the altar which he built; the Amale- 
kites may thus have naturally fought for the oasis of the 
Desert, and the sanctuary of their gods ; and Jethro 
may well have found his kinsmen encamping after 
their long journey, amongst the palms “before the 

1 In Ex. xxiv. 4, it is the same word, though mistranslated “ hill.” See Appendix, 
sub voce. 


42 


SI NAI AND PALESTINE. 


Mount of God,” and acknowledged that the Lord was 
greater even than all the gods who had from ancient days 
been thought to dwell on the lofty peaks which over¬ 
hung their encampment. And then the ground is clear 
for the second start, described in the following chapter. 
“They 4 departed ? from Rephidim, and came to the Desert 
of Sinai, and 4 pitched' in the Wilderness ; and there 
Israel encamped before the Mount.” 1 

If the Wady Feiran, from its palm-grove and its brook, 
be marked out as the first long halting-place of Israel, 
the high valleys of Gebel Mousa with their abundant 
springs no less mark out the second. The great thorough¬ 
fare of the Desert, the longest, and widest, and most con¬ 
tinuous of all the valleys, the Wady Es-Sheykh, would lead 
the great bulk of the host, with the flocks and herds, by 
the more accessible though more circuitous route into the 
central upland ; whilst the chiefs of the people would 
mount directly to the same point by the Nakb Howy, and 
all would meet in the Wady Er-Raheh, the 44 enclosed 
plain ” in front of the magnificent cliffs of the Ras Sasafeh. 
It is possible that the end of the range Furei’a, to 
which the Arab guides give the name of Sena , may 
have a better claim than the Ras Sasafeh, from the 
fact that it commands both the Wady Er-Raheli and 
the Wady Es-Sheykh; and that alone of those peaks it 
appears to retain a vestige of the name of Sinai. It is said 
to contain a level platform with trees, 2 and undoubtedly 
any future traveller will do well to explore it. But no one 
who has approached the Ras Sasafeh through that noble 
plain, or who has looked down upon the plain from that 
majestic height, will willingly part with the belief that 
these are the two essential features of the view of the 
Israelite camp. 3 That such a plain should exist at all 
in front of such a cliff is so remarkable a coincidence 
with the sacred narrative, as to furnish a strong internal 
argument, not merely of its identity with the scene, 

1 Exod. xix. 2. Mousa. As this is a matter of detail, I 

2 See Palmer's Map of Arabia and have thought it best to reserve the 

Syria. argument to be stated according to my 

3 Ritter (Sinai, 590—598) argues for own impressions on the spot. See Part 
the Wady Seb’&yeh, at the back of Gebel II. p. 75. 


S umr el Ti nx a 


I\. far* p. h l. 


MAP OF THE TRADITIONAL SINAI. 


. I«-1»«• ? TI.ili.i 


J <* l» <* 1 el K u r 


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Convent’ of ei A r bain |{ 


,1 pixel Mo us a 


W a d y 

S eb aycli .? 


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Well of Mayan. 
- esh S hunnAr 


Jebel Abu Aidi 


rv 


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Jebel Kat Kerin 




Jvrd/& Hi.s// (‘Jnri/tit ilfi ' 


Published- by JohnMurray, Albemarle St January; 1856. 





































PENINSULA OF SINAI. 


43 


but of the scene itself having been described by an eye¬ 
witness. The awful and lengthened approach, as to some 
natural sanctuary, would have been the fittest preparation 
for the coming scene. The low line of alluvial mounds 
at the foot of the cliff exactly answer to the “ bounds ” 
which were to keep the people off from “ touching 
the Mount.” The plain itself is not broken and uneven 
and narrowly shut in, like almost all others in the 
range, but presents a long retiring sweep, against which 
the people could “ remove and stand afar off.” The 
cliff, rising like a huge altar, in front of the whole congre¬ 
gation, and visible against the sky in lonely grandeur from 
end to end of the whole plain, is the very image of “ the 
mount that might be touched,” and from which the voice 
of God might be heard far and wide over the stillness of 
the plain below, widened at that point to its utmost extent 
by the confluence of all the contiguous valleys. Here, 
beyond all other parts of the Peninsula, is the adytum, 
withdrawn as if in the “ end of the world,” from all the 
stir and confusion of earthly things. 1 And as in the 
Wady Feiran “ the hill” of Paran may be taken as fixing 
with some degree of probability the scene of Rephidim, 
so there are some details of the plain of Er-Raheh which 
remarkably coincide with the scene of the worship of the 
Golden Calf, evidently the same as that of the encampment 
at the time of the Delivery of the Law. In this instance 
the traditional locality is happily chosen. A small 
eminence at the entrance of the convent valley is marked 
by the name of Aaron, as being that from which Aaron 
surveyed the festival on the wide plain below. This 
tradition, if followed out, would of necessity require the 
encampment to be in the Wady Er-Raheh, as every other 
circumstance renders probable. But there are two other 
points which meet here, and nowhere else. First, Moses is 
described as descending the mountain without seeing the 
people ; the shout strikes the ear of his companion before 
they ascertain the cause; the view bursts upon him 
suddenly as he draws nigh to the camp, and he throws 

1 “ If I were to make a model of the valley of the convent of Mount Sinai." 
end of the world, it would be from the —Henniker, p. 225. 


44 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


6. Special 
localities of 
the history. 


down the tables and dashes them in pieces “ beneath the 
mount/' 1 Such a combination might occur in the Wady 
Er-RAheh. Any one coming down from one of the secluded 
basins behind the Ras Sasafeh, through the oblique gullies 
which flank it on the north and south, would hear the 
sounds borne through the silence from the plain, but 
would not see the plain itself till he emerged from the 
Wady Ed-Deir or the Wady Leja ; and when he did so, he 
would be immediately under the precipitous cliff of 
Sasafeh. Further, we are told that Moses strewed the 
powder of the fragments of the idol on the “ waters " 2 of 
the “ brook that came down out of the mount/' This would 
be perfectly possible in the Wady Er-Raheh, into which 
issues the brook of the Wady Leja, descending, it is true, 
from Mount St. Catherine, but still in sufficiently close 
connection with the Gebel Mousa to justify the expression, 
“ coming dowm out of the mount." These two coincidences, 
which must be taken for what they are worth, would not 
occur either at Serbal or in the Wady Sebayeh. In the 
case of the former, although there is the brook from the 
Wady Aleyat, which would probably meet the description, 
there is no corresponding contiguity of the encamp¬ 
ment. In the case of the latter, both are wanting. 

6. It is hardly necessary, after what has been said, to 
examine minutely the special traditional localities of Gebel 
Mousa. How little could have been the desire of finding a 
place which should realise the general impressions of the 
scene ; how the great event which has made Sinai famous 
was forgotten in the search after traces of special incidents, 
of which there could be no memorial, and in the discovery 
of which there could be no real instruction, is sufficiently 
apparent from the fact that, amongst all the pilgrims who 
visited Mount Sinai for so many centuries, hardly one 
noticed, and not one paid any attention to the great plain 
of Er-Raheh. And yet it is the very feature which since 
the time that it was (we may almost say) first discovered 
by Lord Lindsay and Dr. Robinson, must strike any 
thoughtful observer as the point in the whole range the 
most illustrative of Israelite history. There is, how- 


1 Exod. xxxii. 15—19. 


2 Exod. xxxii. 20 ; Deut. ix. 21. 


PENINSULA OF SINAI. 


45 


ever, one general remark that applies to almost all 
the lesser localities. If, on the one hand, the general 
features of the Desert, and of the plain beneath the 
Ras Sasafeh in particular, accord with the authentic 
history of Israel, there is little doubt on the other, 
that the physical peculiarities of the district have suggested 
most of the legendary scenes which subsequent tradition 
has fastened on that history. Where almost every rock 
is a “lusus naturae,” it is not surprising that men, like 
the Greek monks or the Bedouin Arabs, as keen in their 
search for special traces of the history as they were 
indifferent to its impression as a whole, should have 
seen marks of it everywhere. The older travellers, the 
Prefect of the Franciscan convent, Pococke, Shaw, and 
others, all notice what they call Dendrite-stones,— i. e. Fossil 
stones with fossil trees marked upon them. It is curious iee& ’ 
that these have never been observed in later times. But 
in early ages they seem to have been regarded as 
amongst the great wonders of the mountain; they were 
often supposed to be the memorials of the Burning 
Bush. 1 The mark of the back of Moses on the summit The back of 
of the mountain, which bears his name, has been already Moses ‘ 
mentioned. Still more evident is the mark of the body 
of St. Catherine on the summit of Gebel Katherin. The body of 
The rock of the highest point of that mountain swells a e ’ 
into the form of a human body, its arms swathed like that 
of a mummy, but headless ; 2 the counterpart, as it is 
alleged, of the corpse of the beheaded Egyptian saint. 

It is difficult to trace the earliest form of the legend, now 
so familiar through pictorial art, of the transference of the 
Alexandrian martyr by angelic hands to the summit of 
Mount Sinai,—a legend which, in the convent to which the 
relics are thence said to have been carried down, almost 
ranks on an equality with the history of the Burning Bush 
and of the Giving of the Law. But not improbably this gro¬ 
tesque figure on the rock furnishes not merely the illustra¬ 
tion, but the origin of the story. 3 A third well-known instance 

1 See Scheuchzer’s Physique Sacree, rock had swelled into this form on the 

vol. ii., p. 26. arrival of the body. (Walpole, ii. 

2 It is well described by Monconvs, 374.) 

p. 441. Fazakerley was fold that the 3 Falconius (see Butler’s Lives of the 


46 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


The Cow’s 
head. 


The foot¬ 
mark of the 
Mule. 


The sun¬ 
beam of the 
Burning 
Bush. 


The rock 
of Moses. 


of the kind is what in earlier times was called the head—at 
present the mould of the head 1 —of the molten calf, just as 
the rock of St. Catherine is sometimes called the body itself; 
sometimes (to accommodate it to the story of the transfer¬ 
ence of the relics to the convent), the place on which the 
body rested. It is a natural cavity, in a juncture of one or 
two stones, possibly adapted in some slight measure by art, 
representing rudely the round head, with two horns spread¬ 
ing out of it. A fourth, is one of the many curious fissures 
and holes in the weather-beaten rocks near the summit of 
Gebel Mousa, pointed out as the footmark of the mule or 
dromedary of Mahomet. It is true that the monks them¬ 
selves, in the seventeenth century, declared to the Prefect 
of the Franciscan Convent that this mark had been made 
by themselves, to secure the protection of the Bedouin 
tribes. But it has more the appearance of a natural 
hollow, and it is more probable that they were unwil¬ 
ling to let the Prefect imagine that such a phenomenon 
should be accidental, than that they actually invented it. 
Another (which has not found its way into books), is the 
legend in the convent, (as represented in an ancient picture 
of the traditional localities,) of the sunbeam, which on one 
day in the year darts into the Chapel of the Burning 
Bush from the Gebel-ed-Deir. 2 It is only by ascending 
the mountain that the origin of the legend appears. 
Behind the topmost cliffs, a narrow cleft admits of a 
view, of the only view, into the convent buildings, 
which lie far below, but precisely commanded by it, and 
therefore necessarily lit up by the ray, which once in the 
year darts through that especial crevice. 

But the most famous of all these relics is the Bock of 
Moses. Every traveller has described, with more or less 
accuracy, the detached mass, 3 from 10 to 15 feet high as it 
stands,—in the wild valley of the Leja, under the ridge of 

Saints, Nov. 25) expressly asserts his of the angelic flight of the House of 
belief that the whole story of the Loretto. 

miraculoustransportationofthebodyby 1 To Burckhardt it was shown as the 
angels was merely a legendary repre- head of the calf (p. 583). He notices the 
sentation of “ the translation of the fact, that the Arab guides called it, as 
relics ” from Alexandria to Sinai in the now, Has Bukkara, the head of the cow. 
eighth century by the monks. It is 2 See Burckhardt, p. 579. 

thus a curious eastern counterpart 3 See Part II. p. 77. 


PENINSULA OF SINAI. 


the Ras Sasafeh,—slightly leaning forwards, a rude seam 
or scoop running over each side, intersected by wide slits or 
cracks, which might, by omitting or including those of less 
distinctness, be enlarged or diminished to any number 
between ten and twenty; perhaps ten on each side would 
be the most correct account; and the stone between each 
of those cracks worn away as if by the dropping of water 
from the crack immediately above. Unlike as this isolated 
fragment is to the image usually formed of “ the rock 
in Horeb,” and incompatible as its situation is with any 
tenable theory of the event with which it professes to be con¬ 
nected, yet to uncultivated minds, regardless of general 
truth, and eager for minute coincidence, it was most natu¬ 
ral that this rock should have suggested the miracle of 
Moses. There is every reason accordingly to believe that 
this is the oldest legendary locality in the district. It is 
probable that it was known even in the time of Josephus, 
who speaks of the rock as “ lying beside them ”— 
TTapaKCL^vrjv 1 —an expression naturally applicable to a 
fragment like this, but hardly to a cliff in the mountain. 
The situation and form of this stone would also have 
accommodated itself to the strange Rabbinical belief that 
the “rock followed” 2 them through the wilderness; a 
belief, groundless enough under any circumstances, but 
more natural if any Jewish pilgrims had seen or heard of 
this detached mass by the mountain side. It next appears, 
or rather, perhaps, we should say, its first unquestionable 
appearance, is in the reference made more than once in the 
Koran 3 to the rock with the twelve mouths for the twelve 
tribes of Israel, evidently alluding to the curious cracks 
in the stone, as now seen. These allusions probably 
increased, if they did not originate, the reverence of the 
Bedouins, who, at least down to the present generation 
of travellers, are described as muttering their prayers 
before it, and thrusting grass into the supposed mouths 
of the stone. From the middle ages onwards, it has 
always been shown to Christian pilgrims ; and the rude 
crosses on the sides, as well as the traces of stone 

1 Ant. III. i. 7. 3 Koran, ii. 57; vii. 160. 

2 See Notes on 1 Cor. x. 4. 



48 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


Later his¬ 
tory of the 
Peninsula. 


chipped away, indicate the long reverence in which it 
has been held. In more modern times, it has been 
used to serve the two opposite purposes, of demon¬ 
strating on the one hand the truth of the Mosaic 
history, and on the other hand the lying practices of the 
monastic system. Bishop Clayton triumphantly quotes it 
as a voice from the Desert, providentially preserved to 
put the infidels of the eighteenth century to shame. Sir 
Gardner Wilkinson as positively brings it forward to prove 
the deceptions practised by the Greek Church to secure 
the respect of the Arabs and the visits of pilgrims. It is 
one of the many instances in which both arguments are 
equally wrong. It is evidently, like the other examples 
given above, a trick of nature, which has originated a 
legend, and, through the legend, a sacred locality. Pro¬ 
bably less would have been said of it, had more travellers 
observed what Sir Frederick Henniker 1 alone has expressly 
noticed, namely, the fragment which lies in the same valley, 
less conspicuous, but with precisely similar marks. But, 
taking it merely for what it is, of all the lesser objects of 
interest in Sinai, the Rock of Moses is the most remark¬ 
able ; clothed with the longest train of associations, allied 
in thought, though not in fact, to the image, which, of all 
others in the Exodus, has, perhaps, been most frequently 
repeated in the devotions of Jewish and Christian worship ; 
of all the objects in the Desert most bound up with the 
simple faith of its wild inhabitants and of its early visitants. 

V. It has been said, that the history of the Peninsula is 
confined to the history of the Exodus. Yet we must 
not forget that it is the oldest of the “ Holy Places,” 
and accordingly, the halo of that first glory has rested 
upon it long after the events themselves had ceased. There 
are, as has been already intimated, traces of a sanctity 
even anterior to the passage of the Israelites, —a “ Mount 
of God,” honoured by the Amalekite Arabs, and known at 
the Egyptian Court; a belief, as Josephus tells us, that a 

1 Henniker’s Notes, pp. 233, 242. Possibly this might be the “Seat of 
This fragment we saw in 1853. Pococke Moses,” described by Laborde, in the 
(i., 147) had heard of a similar Bueib (“little gate”) or Pass of the 
stone, sixteen miles to the north-west. Wady Es-Sheykh. 


PENINSULA OF SINAI. 


49 


Divine presence dwelt in those awful cliffs—on that long- 
ascent, deemed unapproachable by human footsteps; 
the rich pastures round the mountain foot avoided even by 
the wandering shepherds. 1 But this reverence, whatever 
it was, or to whichever point it might be more especially 
attached, must have been thrown into the shade from the 
moment that it was announced that the ground on which 
Moses stood was “ holy ground,”—still more from the day 
when the Law was given, in “fire, and blackness, and 
tempest.” Yet, as it has been well observed, 2 so high 
already did the Religion which was there first proclaimed 
tower above any local bonds, that throughout the whole 
subsequent history of Judaism there is but one known 
instance of a visit to this its earliest birthplace. The 
whole tenor of the historical and prophetical Scriptures 
is to withdraw the mind from the Desert to Palestine— 
from Sinai to Zion. “ Why leap ye so, ye high ‘mountains \ ’ 
This (Jerusalem) is the ‘ mountain J which God desireth 
to dwell in. . . . The Lord is among them, as in Sinai , 
in the holy place.” 3 “God came from Teman, and the 
Holy One from Mount Paran.” 4 The sanctuary of Horeb 
was not living but dead and deserted. One visitant, 
however, there was to this wild region—it may be, as 
the only one known, out of many unknown pilgrims, 
but, more probably, an exception proving the rule 
—driven here only by the extraordinary circumstances 
of his time, and by his own character and mission, the 
great prophet Elijah. The scene of the address to Elijah 
is now localised in the secluded plain immediately below 
the highest point of Gebel Mousa, marked by the broken 
chapel, and by the solitary cypress. There, or at Serbal, 
may equally be found “the cave,” 5 the only indication 
by which the sacred narrative identifies the spot. There, 

1 Ant. III. v. 1; II. adi. 1. certainly seems to indicate a spe- 

2 Quart. Rev. No. cxxxvii., p. 156. cial locality of some kind. If Serbal 

3 Psalm lxviii. 16, 17. were either Sinai or “Horeb the 

4 jj a b. iii. 3. Mount of God,” there is a cave—or 

5 1 Kings xix. 9—13. Ewald, in the rather cavity—much talked of by the 
expression “the cave,” ver. 9 (the Bedouin Sheykh of the mountain as 
article is not in the English version), the cave (the “ Megara”) to which tra- 
sees the indication of its being vellers are taken—formed by the over- 
a cavern, well known for the re- hanging rock of the summit. See Part 
ception of pilgrims. The expression II. vii. 


1. Elijah’s 
visit. 


50 


SINAI AND PALESTINE, 


2. Visit of 
the inform¬ 
ants of Jo¬ 
sephus. 


3. Allusions 
of St. Paul. 


or at Serbal, equally may have passed before him the 
vision in which the wind rent the granite mountains, and 
broke in pieces the £ cliffs/ 1 followed as at the time of 
Moses, by the earthquake and the fire, and then, in the 
silence of the desert air, by the £ still small voice/ 

-We hear of Sinai no more till the Christian era. In 
the local touches that occur from time to time in Josephus, 
the question rises, whether he, or those from whom he re¬ 
ceived his information,had really passed through the Desert. 
The “ mountain ” of which he speaks emphatically on the 
shores of the Red Sea can be no other than the Gebel 
'Attaka ; the ££ rock lying beside ” Mount Sinai is probably 
the stone of Moses ; and although it may be difficult in ££ the 
highest mountain of the range, so high as not to be visible 
without straining of the sight,” 2 to recognise any peak of 
Sinai, yet the exaggeration is precisely similar to that in 
which he indulges in speaking of the precipices, which 
he had himself seen, about Jerusalem. There is ano¬ 
ther traveller through Arabia at this time, on whose 
visit to Mount Sinai we should look with still greater 
interest. ££ I went into Arabia,” says St. Paul, 3 in describing 
his conversion to the Galatians. It is useless to speculate, 
yet when, in a later chapter 4 of the same Epistle, the words 
fall upon our ears, £< This Hagar is Mount Sinai in Arabia,” 
it is difficult to resist the thought that he, too, may have 
stood upon the rocks of Sinai, and heard from Arab lips 
the often repeated ££ Hagar/”—“rock,”—suggesting the 
double meaning to which that text alludes. 

If the sanctity of Sinai was forgotten under the Jewish 
Dispensation, still more likely was it to be set aside under 
the Christian, where not merely its contrast, but its infe¬ 
riority, was the constant burden of all the allusions to it— 
“the mount that gendereth to bondage,” “the mount 
that might be touched.” 5 But what its own associations 
could not win for it, its desert solitudes did. From the 
neighbouring shores of Egypt — the parent land of 
monasticism—the anchorites and coenobites were drawn 

1 Ver. 11. The word is “Sela,” not 3 Gal. i. 17. 

“Tzur;” see p. 96, and Appendix. 4 Gal. iv. 24,25. 

2 Ant. III. v. 1. 5 Heb. xii. 18. 


PENINSULA OF SINAI. 


51 


by the sight of these wild mountains across the Red Sea; 
and beside the palm-groves of Feiran, and the springs of 
Gebel Mousa, were gathered a host of cells and convents. 
The whole range must have been then to the Greek 
Church what Athos is now. No less than six thousand 
monks or hermits congregated round Gebel Mousa ; 1 and 
Paran must almost have deserved the name of a city at 
the time when it was frequented by the Arabian pilgrims, 
who wrote their names on the sandstone rocks of the 
Wady Mokatteb and the granite blocks of Serbal. Pro¬ 
bably, the tide of Syrian and Byzantine pilgrims chiefly 
turned to Gebel Mousa ; the African and Alexandrian, to 
the nearer sanctuary at Feiran . 2 Of all these memorials 
of ancient devotion, the great convent of the Transfigura¬ 
tion, or, as it was afterwards called, of St. Catherine, alone 
remains. It has been described by every traveller, and 
with the utmost detail by Burckhardt and by Robinson. 
But it is so singular of its kind, that a short summary 
of its aspect and recollections is essential to any 
account of the Peninsula of Sinai. 

Those who have seen the Grande Chartreuse in the 
Alps of Dauphiny, know the shock produced by the sight 
of that vast edifice in the midst of its mountain desert—the 
long, irregular pile, of the Parisian architecture of the 
fifteenth century, the one habitation of the upland wilder¬ 
ness of which it is the centre. It is this feeling, raised to 
its highest pitch, which is roused on finding in the heart of 
the Desert of Sinai the stately Convent of St. Catherine, with 
its massive walls, its gorgeous church hung with banners, 
its galleries of chapels, of cells, and of guest-chambers, its 
library of precious manuscripts, the sound of its rude 
cymbals calling to prayer, and changed by the echoes 
into music as it rolls through the desert valley, the 
double standard of the Lamb and Cross floating high 
upon its topmost towers . 3 And this contrast is height¬ 
ened still more by the fact, that, unlike most monastic 
retreats, its inhabitants and its associations are not 

1 Burckhardt, 546. Gebel Mousa, to avoid blocking up the 

2 s e e Note B. narrow valley, and so preventing the 

3 Part of it is built on the slope of rush of the torrents. (VVellsted, ii. 87.) 

£ 2 


4. Christian 
hermitages. 


Convent of 
St. Cathe¬ 
rine. 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


indigenous, but wholly foreign, to the soil where they 
have struck root. The monks of the Grande Chartreuse, 
however secluded from the world, are still Frenchmen; 
the monks of Subiaco are still Italians. But the monks 
of Sinai are not Arabs, but Greeks. There in the 
midst of the Desert, the very focus of the pure 
Semitic race, the traveller hears once again the accents 
of the Greek tongue; meets the natives of Thessalonica 
and of Samos ; sees in the gardens the produce, not 
of the Desert or of Egypt, but of the isles of Greece ; 
not the tamarisk, or the palm, or the acacia, but the 
olive, the almond tree, the apple tree, the poplar, and the 
cypress of Attica and Corcyra. And as their present 
state so also their past origin, is alike strange to its local 
habitation. No Arab or Egyptian or Syrian patriarch 
erected that massive pile; no pilgrim princess, no ascetic 
King : a Byzantine Emperor, the most worldly of his 
race, the great legislator Justinian, was its founder. 
The fame of his architectural magnificence, which has 
left its monuments in the most splendid churches of 
Constantinople and Ravenna, had penetrated even to 
the hermits of Mount Sinai; and they, “ when they 
heard that he delighted to build churches and found 
convents, made a journey to him, and complained how 
the wandering sons of Ishmael were wont to attack 
them suddenly, eat up their provisions, desolate the place, 
enter the cells, and carry off everything—how they also 
broke into the church and devoured even the holy wafers .” 1 
To build for them as they desired a convent which should 
be to them for a stronghold, was a union of policy and 
religion which exactly suited the sagacious Emperor. 
Petra was just lost, and there was now no point of 
defence against the Arabian tribes, on the whole route 
between Jerusalem and Memphis. Such a point might 
be furnished by the proposed fortress of Sinai; and as the 
old Pharaonic and even Ptolemaic kings of Egypt had 
defended their frontier against the tribes of the Desert by 
fortified temples , 2 so the Byzantine Emperor determined 

1 Eutychii Ann ales, tom. ii. p. 190; Robinson, Biblical Researches, i. p. 556 . 

2 See Sharpe’s History of Egypt, p. 565 . 


PENINSULA OF SINAI. 


53 


to secure a safe transit through the Desert by a fortified 
convent. A tower ascribed to Helena furnished the 
nucleus. It stood by the traditional sites of the Well 
of Jethro and the Burning Bush, a retreat for the 
hermits when in former times they had been hard 
pressed by their Bedouin neighbours. It still remains, 
the residence of the Archbishop of Sinai, if that term 
may be applied to an abode in which that great dignitary 
is never resident; the very gate through which he should 
enter having been walled up since 1722, to avoid the 
enormous outlay for the Arab tribes, who, if it were open 
for his reception, have an inalienable right to be sup¬ 
ported for six months at the expense of the convent. 1 
Round about this tower, like a little town, extend in 
every direction the buildings of the convent, now indeed 
nearly deserted, but still by their number indicating 
the former greatness of the place, when each of the thirty- 
six chapels was devoted to the worship of a separate 
sect. 2 Athwart the whole stretches the long roof of 
the church ; within which, amidst the barbaric splendour 
of the Greek ritual, may be distinguished with interest 
the lotus-capitals of the columns—probably the latest 
imitation of the old Egyptian architecture; and high 
in the apse behind the altar—too high and too obscure 
to recognise their features or lineaments distinctly—the 
two medallions of Justinian and Theodora, probably, 
with the exception of those in St. Yitalis, at Ravenna, the 
only existing likenesses of those two great and wicked 
sovereigns ; than whom perhaps few could be named who 
had broken more completely every one of the laws which 
have given to Sinai its eternal sacredness. 

High beside the church, towers another edifice, which 
introduces us to yet another link in the recollections of 
Sinai—another pilgrim, who, if indeed he ever passed 
though these valleys, ranks in importance with any 
who have visited the spot, since Moses first led thither 
the flocks of Jethro. No one can now prove or disprove 


5 . Mosque 
in the Con¬ 
vent. 


1 See Robinson, Biblical Researches, see the Journey of the Franciscan Pre- 

i. 142. feet, published by Bishop Clayton, p. 22. 

2 For a good account of the chapels, 




54 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


Traditions 
of the visit 
ofMahomet. 


the tradition which relates that Mahomet, whilst yet a camel- 
driver in Arabia, wandered to the great convent, then 
not a century old. It is at least not impossible, and the 
repeated allusions in the Koran to the stone of Moses, 1 
evidently that now exhibited; to the holy valley of Tuwa, 2 
a name now lost, but by which he seems to designate the 
present valley of the convent; and to the special addresses 
made to Moses on the western, and on the southern slopes 
of the mountain, 3 almost bring it within the range of pro¬ 
bability. His name certainly has been long preserved, 
either by the policy or the friendliness of the monks. 
No where else probably in the Christian world is to be 
found such a cordial, it might also be said such a tender 
feeling towards the Arabian prophet and his followers, 
as in the precincts and the memorials of the Convent of 
Mount Sinai. “As he rested,” so the story has with 
slight variations been told from age to age, 4 “ as he rested 
with his camels on Mount Menejia, 5 an eagle was seen to 
spread its wings over his head, and the monks, struck by 
this augury of his future greatness, received him into their 
convent, and he in return, unable to write, stamped with 
ink on his hand the signature to a contract of protection, 
drawn up on the skin of a gazelle, and deposited in the 
archives of the convent.” This contract, if it ever 
existed, has long since disappeared ; it is said, that it 
was taken by Sultan Selim to Constantinople, and 
exchanged for a copy, which however no traveller has ever 
seen. The traditions also of Mahomet in the Peninsula 
have evidently faded away. The stone which was 
pointed out to Laborde in 1828 as that on which Moses 
first, and the youthful camel-driver afterwards, had 
reposed, and to which the Bedouins of his day muttered 
their devotions, is now comparatively unknown. 6 The 
footmark on the rock, whatever it is, invented or pointed 
out by the monks, as impressed by his dromedary or 
mule, according as it is supposed to have been left in 

1 Koran, ii., 57 ; vii. 160. 5 That which closes up the Valley of 

2 Koran, xx., 12. the Convent. 

3 Koran, xx., 82; xxvii., 45, 46. 6 I could hear nothing of it, though 

^ 4 See Laborde’s Commentary on frequently inquiring. 

Exodus and Numbers. 


PENINSULA OF SINAI. 


this early visit, or on his nocturnal flight from Mecca to 
Jerusalem—is now confounded by the Arabs with the 
impress of the dromedary on which Moses rode up and 
down the long ascent to Gebel Mousa. But there still 
remains, though no longer used, the mosque on the top of 
the mountain, and that within the walls of the convent, in 
which the monks allowed the Mahometan devotees to pray 
side by side with Christian pilgrims; founded, according 
to the belief of the illiterate Mussulmans,—in whose mind 
chronology and history has no existence,—in the times of 
the prophet, when Christians and Mussulmans were all one, 
and loved one another as brothers. 1 

As centuries have rolled on, even the Convent of Sinai 6. Present 
has not escaped their influence. The many cells which ^® e ° n f t the 
formerly peopled the mountains have long been vacant. 

The episcopal city of Paran, perhaps in consequence of the 
rise of the foundation of Justinian, has perished almost with¬ 
out a history. The nunnery of St. Episteme has vanished; 
the convent of the good physicians Cosmo and Damian, 
the hermitage of St. Onufrius, the convent of the Forty 
Martyrs—tinged with a certain interest from the famous 
churches of the same name, derived from them, in the 
Forum of Rome, on the Janiculan Hill, and on the Lateran 
—are all in ruins ; and the great fortress of St. Catherine 
probably owes its existence more to its massive walls than 
to any other single cause. Yet it is a thought of singular, 
one might add of melancholy, interest, that amidst all these 
revolutions, the Convent of Mount Sinai is still the one seat 
of European and of Christian civilisation and worship, not 
only in the whole Peninsula of Sinai, but in the whole 
country of Arabia. Still, or at least till within a very few 
years, it has retained a hold, if not on the reason or the 
affections, at least on the superstitions of the Bedouins, 
beyond what is exercised by any other influence. 
Burckhardt and, after him, Robinson, 2 relate with 
pathetic simplicity the deep conviction with which these 
wild children of the Desert believe that the monks com¬ 
mand or withhold the rain from heaven, on which the 
whole sustenance of the Peninsula depends. 

1 See Note A. 2 Burckhardt, p. 567 ; Robinson, i. 132. 


56 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


7. Sanc¬ 
tuary of the 
grave of 
Sheykh 
Saleh. 


It is not for us to judge the difficulties of their 
situation, the poverty and ignorance of the monks, the 
untameable barbarism of the Arabs. Yet looking from 
an external point of view at the singular advantages 
enjoyed by the convent, it is hard to recall another 
institution, with such opportunities so signally wasted. It 
is a colony of Christian pastors planted amongst heathens, 
who wait on them for their daily bread and for their rain 
from heaven, and hardly a spark of civilisation, or of 
Christianity, so far as history records, has been imparted 
to a single tribe or family in that wide wilderness. 
It is a colony of Greeks, of Europeans, of ecclesiastics, in 
one of the most interesting and the most sacred regions 
of the earth, and hardly a fact, from the time of their 
first foundation to the present time, has been contributed 
by them to the geography, the geology, or the history of 
a country, which in all its aspects has been submitted to 
their investigation for thirteen centuries. 

One other sanctuary of the Desert must be mentioned. 
The Bedouin tribes, as has been said, have lost their ancient 
reverence for the traces of the Prophet, and every traveller 
has observed on their godless life. It is very rare indeed 
that any sign of religious worship can be found amongst 
them. Few have any knowledge of the prescribed prayers of 
the Mussulman ; still fewer practise them. But there is one 
exception. In the eastern extremity of the great crescent¬ 
shaped valley which embraces the whole cluster of Sinai, 
is the tomb of the Sheykh, from which the wady derives its 
name—“the Wady Es-Sheykh,” the “Valley of the Saint.” 
In a tenement of the humblest kind is Sheykh Saleh’s grave. 
Who he was, when he lived, is entirely unknown. Possibly 
he may have been the founder of the tribe of that name which 
still exists in the Peninsula; possibly the ancient prophet 
mentioned in the Koran as preaching the faith of Islam 
before the birth of Mahomet. 1 The present belief would 
seem to be, that he was one of the circle of compa¬ 
nions of the prophet, which, according to the defiance 
of all chronological laws in the minds of uneducated 

1 Koran, vii. 71. For the various conjectures as to this great Bedouin Saint, 
see Bitter, Sinai, 650. 


PENINSULA OF SINAI. 


57 


Mussulmans, included Saleh, Moses, David, and Christ, 
as well as Abu Bekr, Omar, and Ali. This tomb is to the 
modern Bedouins the sanctuary of the Peninsula. As 
they approach it, they exhibit signs of devotion never seen 
elsewhere; and once a year all the tribes of the Desert 
assemble round it, and celebrate with races and dances 
a Bedouin likeness of the funeral games round the tomb of 
Patroclus. Sacrifices of sheep and camels, with sprinkling 
of the blood on the walls of this homely chapel, are 
described as accompanying this sepulchral feast . 1 

1 Two descriptions of these funeral saw them in 1835 ; the other, by the 
rites have been preserved: one by celebrated scholar Tischendorf (Reisc 
Schimper, a German, whose MS. travels ii., pp. 207—214 ; Ritter, 653), who saw 
are quoted by Ritter, p. 652, and who them in 1847. See Part II. xii. a. 


NOTE A. 

MUSSULMAN TRADITIONS OF MOUNT SINAI. 

(See pages 30 and 34.) 

I give these as they were communicated by our 
Mussulman servant, Mohammed Ghizawee. Their only 
value is that they slightly vary from those hitherto 
published. They are related, as nearly as possible, in his 
own broken English, as we passed along the Desert. 

1. The Exodus. —Pharaoun, at Cairo, wishes to make his people 
think that he is God Almighty, and says he can bring water by 
rolling on the ground. God allows him to do so : and he brings out 
water. He stands on the top of the two pyramids : one leg on 
each: and pushes up a spear against God: God tells the 
" Malaki,” those flying people you know—[the angels] to put 

blood upon it: and so he thinks that God is dead. 

Well—he squeezes Mousa : Mousa flies down to the sea. He, with 
his own tribe, only a few; and Pharaoun with a great number: 
Mousa prays to God—God tells him to beat the sea with his stick— 
and he and his tribe pass over. . . . Pharaoun comes in too : 

Mousa beats the sea w r ith his stick, and says “ Shut,”—and 
Pharaoun is drowned: God is very cross with Mousa, because he 
drowned Pharaoun without asking Him, and He sends Sid [the 
Lord] Gabriel—Peace be with him—the same that God sent to our 
Prophet—to ask Mousa the reason why. He says that Pharaoun had 




58 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


begged for help, not saying "If it please God,”—but "If you 
please,”—and so he had taken it into his own hands. 

Ayoun Mousa .—" There are two wells, one on each side of the 
Red Sea:—both f Ayoun Mousa ,' which Mousa brought up by striking 
the ground with his stick.” 

2. Hammam Pharaoun. —[This was from the Bedouins.] When 
Pharaoun came into the sea, and Mousa said " Shut,” Pharaoun called 
out "Save me;” and when the sea came back, Pharaoun put his 
hands to his mouth, and breathed out a great breath—his last 
breath. The air came out warm, and so there are the warm baths by 
the sea-shore. And there are the Hammam Mousa—the baths of 
Mousa—where he pushed with his stick, and the water came. 

3. Sinai. —Gebel Sidni Mousa ["the mountain of my Lord 
Moses”] is so called, because when Mousa was there, he called on 
God that he might see Him. God Almighty loved Mousa very 
much; but when Mousa asked this, God said to him " Shame,”— 
and Mousa became frightened, and went back into the rock: and 
the granite has the mark of his back. This is the only reason why 
it is called Gebel Mousa. I know nothing about the giving of the 
Ten Commandments. The mark of the dromedary is not of the 
Prophet's,—he never was there. It was Mousa's dromedary—which 
never left him; and he rode upon this dromedary, when he went to 
call to see God. The mosque and the convent were built both in a 
day—in Mousa's time—when Christians and Mussulmans did not 
quarrel, and knew that they were both made by God. 

4. Jethro , or Shouaib. —" He is Nebi Shouaib—like Sheikh Saleh, 
whose tomb we saw the other day, who was not only a Sheikh, 
but a Nebi [Prophet]. They were all Souabi—companions of 
Mohammed.”—[The Bedouins knew nothing of him, except that 
Wady Shouaib was the name of one of the valleys near the 
convent.] 

5. St. Catherine. "Gebel Katherin is called so from Sittah 
Mariam—our great Lady—Mary you call her. She and Catherine 
are one and the same,—and she came here when she fled away to 
Cairo with the Lord Isa [Jesus], when they tried to nail him to the 


PENINSULA OP SINAI. 


59 


NOTE B. 

SINAITIC INSCRIPTIONS. 

(See page 51.) 

I have preferred to give my account of these inscrip¬ 
tions as nearly as possible in the words of a letter, written 
immediately after having seen the last of them on the 
frontier of the Desert, because I wish to confine myself 
simply to facts which fell under my own observation. 
Those who wish to know the latest and most scientific 
hypothesis on the subject of the language and contents 
of these inscriptions, will find it in Chevalier Bunsen’s 
“ Christianity and Mankind,” vol. iii. pp. 231—234. I 
will take this opportunity of expressing a doubt whether 
the learned author is justified in his identification of 
“ the palm-grove on the sea-shore,” mentioned by 
Diodorus and Strabo, with the palm-grove of Feiran. I 
took the same view myself till I had been on the spot, 
but now feel convinced that they must have intended the 
second great palm-grove of the Desert, that of Tor, which 
is on the shore ; whereas that of Feiran is so entirely in 
the heart of the mountains, that it could only by the 
greatest inaccuracy be so designated. The places here 
indicated as marked by the inscriptions, are most of 
them described in the ensuing Letters and Notes. 

I here briefly sum up my experience of the Sinaitic inscriptions, 
in which, of course I go entirely by their appearance, not by their 
language, of which I have no knowledge whatever. 1. I have 
seen them in the following places: First, in the Wady Sidri, the 
Wady Megara, and in great numbers in the Wady Mokatteb. I 
class these valleys together, because they are within three hours of 
each other. Secondly, a few in the lower parts of the W&dy Feiran. 
Thirdly, in considerable numbers up the Wady Aleyat, and five or six 
in the Wady Abou Hamad, and three on the summit of Mount 
Serbal. These I class together as being all on the passage to the 
top of Serbal. Fourthly, in the Wady Solab, three or four, and 
in great numbers in the Nakb-Howy. This valley and pass form 
together the lower road between Serbal and Sinai. Fifthly, in great 
numbers in the Leja, up to the first ascent of the " Shuk Mousa,” 
or ravine by which you mount St. Catherine. Sixthly, on the high 


60 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


table-plain, called Herimet Haggag, between the Wady Sayal 
and the Wady-el-*Ain; the rock which stands at the end of this 
plain has more in proportion than any other spot I have seen, 
and there are some in the sandstone labyrinths near it. Seventhly, 
a few on the staircase leading up to the Deir at Petra, and, 
apparently, on the “isolated column” in the plain. (Some of 
our fellow-travellers also found them in a tomb near the Theatre.) 
Eighthly, on the broken columns of a ruin at or near the ancient 
Malatha, immediately before entering the hills of Judea. 

2. This enumeration will show how widely spread they are; it 
will also, I think, show that in some instances at least they have 
been cut by pilgrims or travellers, visiting particular, and probably, 
sacred localities. I allude to those of the Leja, the Deir at Petra, 
and especially Serbal. In all these places there is no thoroughfare, 
and therefore the places themselves must have been the object of 
the writers. What could have been their purpose in the Leja it is 
difficult to say, for they go beyond the traditional Eock of Moses, 
and yet they fall far short of the summit of St. Catherine; nor 
have they any connection with the traditional scenes of the giving 
of the Law, Gebel Mousa being entirely without them. At Petra 
their object is evidently the Deir. At Serbal their object must have 
been something at the top of the mountain itself. [It will be seen 
that I have not visited the “ Gebel Mokatteb,” which is an isolated 
mountain on the shore of the Eed Sea, hitherto described only by 
the Comte d'Amtraigues. See Porster’s “ Voice of Israel,” p. 84.] 
It should also be observed, that they are nearly, though not quite, 
as numerous on the east as on the west of the peninsula. Those in 
the south lay out of my route. 

3. Their situation and appearance is such as in hardly any case 
requires more than the casual work of passing travellers. Most 
of them are on sandstone, those of Wady Mokatteb and Herimet 
Haggag, and Petra, of course very susceptible of inscriptions. 
Those which are on granite are very rudely and slightly scratched. 
At Herimet Haggag one of us scooped out a horse, more complete 
than any of these sculptured animals, in ten minutes. Again, none 
that I saw, unless it might be a very doubtful one at Petra, 
required ladders or machinery of any kind. Most of them 
could be written by any one, who, having bare legs and feet as all 
Arabs have, could take firm hold of the ledges, or by any active 
man even with shoes. I think there are none that could not have 
been written by one man climbing on another's shoulder. Amongst 
the highest in the Wady Mokatteb are single Greek names. 

4. Their numbers seem to me to have been greatly exaggerated. I 
had expected in the Wady Mokatteb to see both sides of a deep defile 
covered with thousands. Such is not the case by any means. The 
Wady Mokatteb is a large open valley, almost a plain, with no con- 


PENINSULA OP SINAI. 


61 


tinuous wall of rock on either side, but masses of rock receding 
and advancing; and it is only or chiefly on these advancing masses, 
that the inscriptions straggle, not by thousands, but at most by 
hundreds or fifties. So, on Serbal, I think we could hardly have 
overlooked any; but w$ saw no more than three, though it is 
difficult to reconcile this with the statement of Burckhardt, that he 
had there seen many inscriptions. They are much less numerous 
than the scribblings of the names of Western travellers on the monu¬ 
ments in the Yalley of the Nile since the beginning of this century. 

5. So far as the drawings of animals by which they are usually 
accompanied, indicate the intention of the inscriptions themselves, 
it is difficult to conceive that that intention could have been 
serious or solemn. The animals are very rudely drawn; they are of 
all kinds; asses, horses, dogs, but, above all, ibexes; and these 
last, in forms so ridiculous, that, making every allowance for the 
rudeness of the sculpture, it is impossible to invest them with any 
serious signification. The ludicrous exaggeration of the horns of 
the ibex was almost universal; and no animal occurred so fre¬ 
quently. Sometimes they are butting other animals. Sometimes they, 
as well as asses and horses, occur disconnected w r ith inscriptions. 

6. As regards their antiquity, I observed the following data. 
There was great difference of age, both in the pictures and letters, 
as indicated by the difference of colour; the oldest, of course, being 
those which approached most nearly to the colour of the rock. 
But, first, I found none on fallen rocks inverted, and, though I 
doubt not that there may be such, the sandstone crumbles so rapidly 
that this is no proof of age. A famous Greek inscription at Petra 
fell in 1846. Secondly, they are intermixed, though not in great 
numbers, with Greek and Arabic, and in one or two instances Latin 
inscriptions, these in some cases bearing the same appearance of 
colour, wear and tear, as the Sinaitic. Thirdly, these Greek inscrip¬ 
tions, which alone I could read, were chiefly the names of the 
writers. The only Latin inscription which I remember was in the 
sandstone rocks near Herimet Haggag,— Pertus. Pourthly, Crosses 
of all kinds, chiefly + and were very numerous and con¬ 
spicuous, standing usually at the beginning of the inscriptions, and 
(what is important) occurring also and in the same position before 
those written in Greek and Arabic; often nothing but the cross, 
sometimes the cross with Alpha and Omega. [These last were in the 
same place where I noticed the Latin inscription, (thus A + 12,) of 
the same colour as the contiguous Sinaitic characters.] Prom having 
previously seen that Porster and Tuch (the last German writer on 
the subject) had united in the conclusion that the hypothesis of 
their being Christian inscriptions was groundless, and that the 
alleged appearance of crosses was a mistake, I was the more 
surprised to find them in such numbers, and of such a character; 


62 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


and however else they may be explained, I can hardly imagine a 
doubt that they are the work, for the most part, of Christians, 
whether travellers or pilgrims. They are in this case curious, and 
if their object could be ascertained, would throw great light on 
the traditions of the Peninsula; but it cannot be reconciled with 
the theory of their being the work of Israelites. If the date of the 
columns at Malatha could be ascertained, or of the temple and 
tomb at Petra where they occur, the question would be settled. 
The two latter, I presume, cannot be older than the Roman 
dominion of Arabia. 

[I may here add the curious fact, that Laborde describes a Latin 
inscription in a certain tomb at Petra as “ an inscription in three 
lines, carved on a tablet, and of importance, as giving the name 
of the officer, Quintus Praetextus Plorentinus, who died at Petra 
while he was governor of this part of Arabia. It appears to be 
of the time of Adrian or Antoninus Pius.” (Laborde’s “ Sinai and 
Petra,” Eng. Tr., p. 289.) He indicates its position so precisely, 
that there was no difficulty in identifying it. But no single fact 
which he thus describes can be found in the inscription, and no 
single fact mentioned in the inscription is found in his description 
of it. It was as follows:— 

.... NTONII P . . I.TINI . . . IIIVIRD. AVRATO 

.... FLANDO • TRIB • MIL. 

MINERVAE PROVINCIAE TRIB • PLEB 
VIII. HISP • PROCOS. 

LEG * AYG. PR. PR. . . . PATRI EX TESTA .... 

IPSIUS. 

One of the Sinaitic inscriptions of Petra is given in the “ Zeit- 
schrift der D. Morgenlandischen Gesellschaft,” ix. 230.] 



SINAI. 


\ 


PART II. 

THE JOURNEY FROM CAIRO TO JERUSALEM. 

The following extracts are either from letters, or (when 
bracketed) from journals, written on the spot or immediately 
afterwards. Such only are selected as served to convey the succes¬ 
sive imagery of the chief stages of the journey, or as contained 
details not mentioned by previous travellers. My object has been 
to give the impressions of the moment, in the only way in which 
they could be given,—as the best illustrations of the more general 
statements elsewhere founded upon them. 

I. Departure from Egypt; Overland Route ; First Encampment.—II. The Passage 
of the Red Sea. (1.) Approach to Suez. (2.) Suez. (3.) Wells of Moses.— 
III. The Desert, and Sandstorm.—IY. Marah; Elim.r—V. Second Encampment by 
the Red Sea; “ Wilderness of Sin.” 

VI. Approach to Mount Serbal; Wady Sidri and Wady Feiran.—VII. Ascent of 

Serbai. 

VIII. Approach to Gebel Mousa, the traditional Sinai.—IX. Ascent of Gfebel 
Mousa and R&s Sasafeh.—X. Ascent of St. Catherine.—XI. Ascent of the Gebel- 
ed-Deir. 

XII. Route from Sinai to the Gulf of ’Akaba. (a.) Tomb of Sheykh Saleh. ( b .) 
Wady Sayai and Wady El ’Ain. Hazeroth. XIII. Gulf of ’Akaba ; Elath. 

XIV. The ’Arabah.—XV. Approach to Petra.—XVI. Ascent of Mount Hor. 
XVII. Petra. Kadesh. 

XVIII. Approach to Palestine.—XIX. Recollections of the First Day in Palestine. 
—XX. Hebron. — XXI. Approach to Bethlehem and Jerusalem.—XXII. First 
View of Bethlehem.—XXIII. First View of Jerusalem, 





EXTRACTS FROM LETTERS, ETC. 


I.—DEPARTURE FROM EGYPT—OVERLAND ROUTE—FIRST 
ENCAMPMENT. 

It was too hazy to see anything in the distance,—even the 
Pyramids were but shadows. Soon the green circle of cultivated 
land receded from view, like the shores as you sail out to sea, and 
in an hour we were in the Desert ocean. Not, however, a wide circle 
of sand, but a wild waste of pebbly soil, something like that of the 
Plaine de Crau (near Marseilles), broken into low hills, and present¬ 
ing nowhere an even horizon. But the remarkable feature was a 
broad beaten track, smooth and even, and distinctly marked as any 
turnpike road in England, only twice the width, and running straight 
as a railway or Boman road through these desert hills. 

It was a striking sight in itself, to see the great track of civilised 
man in such a region. One of the party said, that the only thing 
to which it could be compared was the high-road from Petersburgh 
to Moscow. It was still more striking when you knew what it was, 
the great thoroughfare of the British empire becoming yearly more 
important and interesting, as the course which so many friends have 
travelled, and will travel. Even the Exodus for that day waxed 
faint before it. And, lastly, it was most instructive, as the only 
likeness probably which I shall ever see of those ancient roads, 
carried through the Desert in old times to the seats of the Babylonian 
and Persian Empires, to which allusion is made in the 40th chapter 
of Isaiah. In this comparatively level region, it is true, no moun¬ 
tains had to be brought low, nor valleys filled up; but it was literally 
“ a high-way prepared in the wilderness; ” and the likeness was only 
interrupted, not obscured, by the solitary stations and telegraphs 
which, at intervals of every five miles, broke the perfect desolation. 
It has hitherto run along our whole course. To-day, between 
heaps of stones—said by one of the dragomans to be the graves of 
Ibrahim Pasha’s soldiers—which, as the heaps extend for miles and 
miles, with the utmost regularity, needs no remark, except as an 
instance of the extreme rapidity with which false local traditions 
spring up. They really are the “ stones,” the stumbling-blocks 
“ cast up ” 1 out of the way, and so left on each side of the road to 
mark it more distinctly. 

1 Isa. xl. 3; lxii. 10. 




PENINSULA OF SINAI. 


65 


Nothing was more striking to me in our first encampment than 
the realisation of the first lines in Thalaba:— 

“ How beautiful is night, 

A dewy freshness fills the silent air.” 

There is the freshness without coldness, and there is the silence 
doubly strange as compared with the everlasting clatter of the streets 
and inns of Cairo, and the incessant sound of songs, and screams, and 
shocks of the boat upon the Nile; nothing heard but the slight move¬ 
ment amongst the Bedouin circles round their fires, and from time 
to time a plaintive murmur from the camels as they lie, like stranded 
ships, moored round the tents. 

II.—THE PASSAGE OF THE RED SEA. 

(1.) Approach to Suez. —I have at last, as far as mortal eyes can 
see it, seen the passage of the Red Sea. It was about 3 p.m. 
yesterday, that as we descended from the high plain on which we 
had hitherto been moving, by a gentle slope through the hills, 
called, by figure of speech, the “ defile” of Muktala, a new view 
opened before us. Long lines, as if of water, which we immediately 
called out to be the sea, but which was, in fact, the mirage; but 
above these, indubitably, the long silvery line of even hills—the 
hills of Asia. Onwards we still came, and in the plain below us 
lay on the left a fortress, a tomb, and a fortified wall. 

This is 'Ajerud, famous as the first great halting-place of the 
Mecca Pilgrimage; famous as the scene of Eothen's adventure; 
still more famous as being the only spot on the road which, by 
its name and position, can claim to be identified with any of the 
stations mentioned in the flight of the Israelites. It may possibly be 
Pi-hahiroth. 1 

If it was so, then the low hills of Muktala, through which we 
descended, are Migdol, and Baal Zephon was Suez, which lay on the 
blue waters of the sea now incontrovertibly before us east and south; 
and high above the whole scene, towered the Gebel 'Attaka, the 
“ Mountain of Deliverance,” a truly magnificent range, which, 
after all, is the one feature of the scene unchanged and unmistake- 
able. Every theory of the passage combines in representing this 
as the impediment which prevented the return of the Israelites into 

1 Exod. xiv. 2, 9. Numb, xxxiii. 7, 

8. “Pi-hahiroth” may be either—(1) in 
Hebrew, “mouth of caverns,” as in the 
Vatican MS. of the LXX., Numb, 
xxxiii. 7, t b art/xa E IpkQ ; or much 
more probably, (2) in Egyptian, “the 
grassy places,”—“Pi” being the Egyptian 
article ; as in Alex. MS. of the LXX 
fVauAets. There is no appearance of 
verdure now, either at ’ Ajerud, nor appa¬ 


rently at any corresponding spot in the 
W&dy Tu&rik. The name, however, 
may, after all, be derived from the name 
of the Saint, “’Ajerfid,” who is said to 
be buried in the tomb beside the fortress 
(Burton’s Pilgrimage to Medineh, i. 
p. 230), unless, which is equally probable, 
the name of the Saint was invented to 
account for the name of the place. See 
like instances in Chapter VI. 

F 


66 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


Egypt when Pharaoh appeared on their rear. It was this which 
“ shut them in” 1 _ 


(2.) Suez. —This morning I stood on the flat roof of the house, 
and with Dr. Robinson's book in my hand, made out every locality. 
Somewhere within my view,—somewhere under that jagged mountain, 
—the greatest event before the Christian era must have taken place. 
Close under one's feet, were the sandy shoals all around the modern 
town of Suez,—over which they passed, according to one theory; 
further down the gulf opened the deep blue sea, with the Asiatic hills 
just visible on the Eastern side,—over which they passed, according 
to the other. It is the less necessary and the less possible to decide 
precisely, because the limits of the Desert in the previous route 
have evidently changed since “ the edge of the wilderness" 2 was 
only a day’s march from the sea; as the limits of the sea have also 
changed, since the time when it ran far up into the north, 

(3.) From the Wells of Moses ('Ayoun Mouse!). —The wind drove 
us to shore; and on the shore—the shore of Arabia and Asia 
—we landed in a driving sand-storm, and reached this place, 'Ayoun 
Mousa, the “ Wells of Moses.'' It is a strange spot,—this plot of 
tamarisks with its seventeen wells,—literally an island in the Desert, 
and now used as the Richmond of Suez,—a comparison which chiefly 
serves to show what a place Suez itself must be. It is not mentioned 
in the Bible, but coming so close as it does upon any probable 
scene of the passage, one may fairly connect it with the song of 
Miriam. And now once more for the Passage. Erom the beach, 
within half an hour's walk from hence, the shore commands a view 
across the Gulf into the wide opening of the two ranges of mountains, 3 
the opening of the valley through which the traditional Exodus took 
place, and consequently the broad blue sea of the traditional passage. 
This, therefore, is the traditional spot of the landing, and this, with the 
whole view of the sea as far as Suez, I saw to-night; both at sunset, 
as the stars came out; and later still by the full moon—the white 
sandy desert on which I stood, the deep black river-like sea, and 
the dim silvery mountains of 'Attaka on the other side. These are 
the three features which are indisputable. You know the Straits 
of Gibraltar,—the high mountains of Africa, the green swells of 
Europe, the straits which divide them. Such in their way are the 
three characteristic features of this great boundary of Africa and 
Asia, on which the Israelites looked through the moonlight of that 
memorable night. Behind that high African range lay Egypt, with 
all its wonders; the green fields of the Nile, the immense cities, the 

1 Josephus (Ant. II. xv. 3.) mentions 2 Exod. xiii. 20. 

“the mountain.” 3 See Part I. p. 36. 




PENINSULA OF SINAI. 


67 


greatest monuments of human power and wisdom. On this Asiatic 
side begins immediately a wide circle of level desert stone and sand, 
free as air, but with no trace of human habitation or art, where 
they might wander as far as they saw, for ever and ever. And 
between the two rolled the deep waters of the sea, rising and falling 
with the tides, which, except on its shores, none of them could 
have seen,—the tides of the great Indian Ocean, unlike the still 
dead waters of the Mediterranean Sea. “The Egyptians whom 
they had seen yesterday they will see no more for ever.” Most 
striking, too, it is to look on that mountain of 'Attaka, and feel that 
on its northern and its southern extremity settle the main differences 
which on so many like questions have divided the Church in after 
times. Eor the passage at its southern end are the local Arab tradi¬ 
tions, the poetical interest of its scenery, the preconceived notions of 
one's childhood. Eor the passage at the northern end are the ancient 
traditions of the Septuagint; almost all the arguments founded on 
the text of the Bible itself; all the wishes to bring the event 
within our own understanding. It is remarkable that this event 
—almost the first in our religious history—should admit on the 
spot itself of both these constructions. But the mountain 
itself remains unchanged and certain—and so does the fact 
itself which it witnessed. Whether the Israelites passed over the 
shallow waters of Suez by the means, and within the time, 
which the narrative seems to imply, or whether they passed through 
a channel ten miles broad, with the waves on each side piled 
up to the height of 180 feet, there can be no doubt that they 
did pass over within sight of this mountain and this desert by a 
marvellous deliverance. The scene is not impressive in itself, 
—that at Suez especially is matter of fact in the highest degree, 
and even that at 'Ayoun Mousa is not amongst those grand frame¬ 
works, such as at Marathon and elsewhere correspond to the 
event which they have encompassed. In this very fact, however, 
there is something instructive; “ a lesson,” as the Arabian Nights 
say, “to be graven on the understanding for such as would be 
admonished.” 


HI.-THE DESERT, AND SAND-STORM. 

The clearing up of the sand the next morning revealed a low 
range of hills on the eastern horizon, the first step to the vast 
plain of Northern Arabia. The day after leaving 'Ayoun Mousa 
was at first within sight of the blue channel of the Bed Sea. 
“ Thy way is in the sea, and thy path in the deep waters, 
and thy footsteps are not known .” How true, as of so much 
beside, so of the uncertainty attending the precise locality of the 
passage. But soon Bed Sea and all were lost in a sand-storm, 


68 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


which lasted the whole day. 1 ' Imagine all distant objects entirely 
lost to view,—the sheets of sand fleeting along the surface of the 
Desert like streams of water; the whole air filled, though invisibly, 
with a tempest of sand driving in your face like sleet. Imagine the 
caravan toiling against this,—the Bedouins, each with his shawl 
thrown completely over his head, half of the riders sitting back¬ 
wards,—the camels, meantime, thus virtually left without guidance, 
though, from time to time, throwing their long necks sideways to 
avoid the blast, yet moving straight onwards with a painful sense 
of duty truly edifying to behold. I had thought that with the Nile 
our troubles of wind were over ; but (another analogy for the ships 
of the Desert) the great saddlebags act like sails to the camels, and 
therefore, with a contrary wind, are serious impediments to their 
progress. And accordingly Mohammed opened our tents this 
morning just as he used to open our cabin-doors, with the joyful 
intelligence that the wind was changed,—"good wind, master.” 
Through this tempest, this roaring and driving tempest, which 
sometimes made me think that this must be the real meaning of “ a 
howling wilderness,” 2 we rode on the whole day. 

IY.-MARAH-ELIM. 

We were undoubtedly on the track of the Israelites, and we saw 
the spring 8 which most travellers believe to be Marah, and the two 
valleys, one of which must almost certainly, both perhaps, be Elim. 
The general scenery is either immense plains, or latterly a succession 
of water-courses, that especially of Ghurundel, exactly like the dry 
bed of a Spanish river. These gullies gradually bring you 
into the heart of strange black and white mountains, the ranges 
of which overhang the Bed Sea above the Hot Wells of Pharaoh, 
where, according to the Arab traditions of these parts, somewhat 
invalidating that of 'Ayoun Mousa, Pharaoh literally breathed his last. 
Eor the most part the Desert was absolutely bare, but Wady 
Ghurundel and Wady Useit, the two rivals for Elim, are fringed 
with trees and shrubs, the first vegetation we have met in the Desert. 
These are so peculiar and so interesting that I must describe each. 
Eirst, there are the wild palms, successors of the “ threescore and 
ten.” Not like those of Egypt or of pictures, but either dwarf,—that 
is, trunkless—or else with savage hairy trunks and branches all 
dishevelled. Then there are the feathery tamarisks, here assuming 
gnarled boughs and hoary heads, worthy of their venerable situation, 

1 1 have retained this account of the 1841, and again of another two months 
sandstorm, chiefly because it seems to be after ourselves in 1853. 
a phenomenon peculiar to this special 2 Deut. xxxii. 10. It must mean either 
region. Van Egmont, Niebuhr, Miss this, or the howling of wild beasts. 
Martineau, all notice it, and it was just 3 There is nothing to add to Robinson’s 
as violent at the passage of a friend in description (i. 96). See Part I. p. 37. 


PENINSULA OF SINAI. 


69 


on whose leaves is found what the Arabs call manna. Thirdly, 
there is the wild acacia, the same as we had often seen in Egypt, 
but this also tangled by its desert growth into a thicket; the 
tree of the Burning Bush, and the shittim-wood of the Tabernacle. 
Keble's expression of the “ towering thorn” is one of his few inaccu¬ 
racies. No one who has seen it would have used that expression for 
the tangled spreading tree, which shoots out its gray foliage and 
white blossoms over the Desert. 1 

To-day occurred a curious instance of the tenacious adherence 
of the Bedouins to their own traditions. We passed a cairn, said 
to be the grave of the horse of Abou Zennab, his horse killed in 
battle. Who Abou Zennab was—when he lived—what the battle 
was—is quite unknown, but he left an ordinance that every Arab 
should throw sand on the cairn as if it were barley, and say, “ Eat, 
eat, O horse of Abou Zennab,” as if the dead creature was still alive. 
So said our Bedouin, and accordingly each Arab muttered the 
words, and pushed the sand twice or thrice with his foot as he 
passed. I could not help thinking of the Bechabites, as described 
by Jeremiah. 3 

V.—SECOND ENCAMPMENT BY THE BED SEA — <( WILDERNESS 
OP SIN.” 

Another glorious day. We passed a third claimant to the title of 
Elim, the WadyTayibeh, palms, and tamarisks, venerable as before; 
then down one of those river-beds, between vast cliffs white on the 
one side, and on the other, of a black calcined colour, between 
which burst upon us once more the deep blue waters of the Bed Sea, 
bright with their white foam. Beautiful was that brilliant contrast, 
and more beautiful and delightful still to go down upon the beach and 
see the waves breaking on that shell-strewn weed-strewn shore, and 
promontory after promontory breaking into those waters right and 
left: most delightful of all the certainty,—I believe I may here say 
the certainty (thanks to that inestimable verse in Numbers xxxiii.), 
—that here the Israelites, coming down through that very valley, 
burst upon that very view,—the view of their old enemy and old 
friend,—that mysterious sea, and one more glimpse of Egypt dim 
in the distance in the shadowy hills beyond it. Above the blue sea 
rose the white marbly terraces, then blackened by the passage of the 
vast multitude. High above those terraces ranged the brown cliffs 
of the Desert, streaked here and there with the purple bands which 
now first began to display themselves. And as the bright blue sea 
formed the base of the view, so it was lost above in a sky of the 
deepest blue that I have ever observed in the East. 

We turned aside at last into the plain of Murk&—probably the 
wilderness of Sin. 


1 See Part I. p. 21. . 1 . 

2 Jer. xxxv. This slightly differs from Robinson’s account (i. p. 




70 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


Red mountains closed it in on the north, one of which the 
Bedouins called Um-Shomer—different from the far greater mountain 
of that name. Over the hills to the south was the first view of the 
peaks of Serbal. From this plain we entered the Wady Shellal—the 
“Valley of Cataracts;” thus, for the first time, plunging into the 
bosom of the strangely-formed and strangely-coloured mountains 
we had seen so long in the distance. They closed the prospect in 
front,—red tops resting on black or dark-green bases. The nearer 
rocks cast their deep evening shades along the level surface of the 
valley. The bright caper plant hung from their cliffs, and dwarf 
palms nestled under the overhanging cliff at the entrance. 


VI.-APPROACH TO MOUNT SERBAL—WADY SIDRI AND WADY 

FEIRAN. 

The first great ascent we had made was after leaving the Wady 
Shellal. A stair of rock [the Nakb Badera] brought us into 
a glorious wady (Sidri), enclosed between red granite mountains 
descending as precipitously upon the sands as the Bavarian 
hills on the waters of the Konigsee. It was a sight worthy of all 
remembrance, before we reached this, to see the sunbeams striking 
the various heights of white and red, and to think what an effect 
this must have had as the vast encampment, dawn by dawn, in these 
mountains, broke up with the shout, “ Rise up. Lord, and let Thine 
enemies be scattered; and let them that hate Thee flee before 
Thee.” 1 In the midst of the Wady Sidri, just where the granite was 
exchanged for sandstone, I caught sight of the first inscription. 
A few more followed up the course of a side valley where we turned 
up to see (strange sight in that wild region !) Egyptian hieroglyphics 
and figures carved in the cliffs,—strange sight, too, for the Israelites 
if they passed this way; like that second glimpse of the Red Sea, for 
these hieroglyphics are amongst the oldest in the world, and were 
already there before the Exodus. Of the other inscriptions, the chief 
part were in the next valley, Mokatteb, " of writing,” so called from 
them. Of these I will speak elsewhere.* Erom the Wady Mokatteb, 
we passed into the endless windings of the Wady Eeiran. I cannot 
too often repeat, that these wadys are exactly like rivers, except in 
having no water; and it is this appearance of torrent-bed and banks 
and clefts in the rocks for tributary streams, and at times even rushes 
and shrubs fringing their course, which gives to the whole wilderness 
a doubly dry and thirsty aspect—signs of 

“Water, water everywhere, and not a drop to drink.” 

Here, too, began the curious sight of the mountains, streaked 
from head to foot, as if with boiling streams of dark red matter 

1 Num. x. 35. 2 g ee N ote p to p art j 


PENINSULA OF SINAI. 


71 


poured over them; really the igneous fluid squirted upwards, as they 
were heaved from the ground. On the previous part of that day, 
and indeed often since, the road lay through what seemed to be 
the ruins, the cinders, of mountains calcined to ashes, 1 like the heaps 
of a gigantic foundry. I cannot conceive a more interesting country 
for a geologist. Even to the most uneducated eye the colours tell 
their own story, of chalk and limestone, and sandstone, and granite; 
and these portentous appearances are exactly such as give the impres¬ 
sion that you are indeed travelling in the very focus of creative 
power. I have looked on scenery more grand, and on scenery as 
curious (the Saxon Switzerland), but on scenery at once so grand 
and so strange I never have looked, and probably never shall again. 
One other feature I must add. Huge cones of white clay and sand 
are at intervals planted along these mighty watercourses, guarding 
the embouchure of the valleys; apparently the original alluvial 
deposit of some tremendous antediluvian torrent, left there to stiffen 
into sandstone. We encamped at El Hessue, the first, but not the 
largest of those groves of tamarisks and palms which make the 
Wady Eeiran so important a feature in the Desert. 

VII.-ASCENT OF MOUNT SERBAL. 

At 5.30 a.m. we started. We passed the instructive and sug¬ 
gestive sight of the ruins of the old Christian city and episcopal 
palace of Paran, under the hill which has great claims to be that on 
which Moses prayed, whilst the battle of Kephidim was fought for the 
passage through what is now (whatever it may have been) the oasis 
of the Desert. 2 We then turned up the long watercourse occupied in 
part by the brook of Wady'Aleyat, which conducted us to the base 
of the mountain, where the spring rises amidst moss and fern. 

It is one of the finest forms I have ever seen. It is a vast mass 
of peaks, which, in most points of view, may be reduced to five, 
the number adopted by the Bedouins. These five peaks, all of 
granite, rise so precipitously, so column-like, from the broken 
ground which forms the root of the mountain, as at first sight to 
appear inaccessible. But they are divided by steep ravines, filled 
with fragments of fallen granite. Up the central ravine. Wady Abou- 
Hamad (“ valley of the father of wild figs," so called from half-a- 
dozen in its course), we mounted. It was toilsome, but not difficult, 
and in about three hours we reached a ridge between the third and 
fourth peak. Here we rested; close by us were the traces of a large 
leopard. A little beyond was a pool of water surrounded by an old 
enclosure. 

Three-quarters of an hour more brought us over smooth blocks of 
granite to the top of the third or central peak, the steep ascent 

2 See Part I. p. 41. 


1 See Part. I. p. 23. 




SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


was broken by innumerable shrubs like sage or thyme, which grew 
to the very summit; and at last, also helped by loose stones arranged 
by human hands (whether yesterday or two thousand years ago), and 
through a narrow pass of about twenty feet, to the two eminences 
of which this peak is formed. 

The highest of these is a huge block of granite; on this, as on the 
back of some petrified tortoise, you stand and overlook the whole 
Peninsula of Sinai. The Bed Sea, with the Egyptian hills opposite; 
and the wide waste of the Ka'a on the south, the village and grove of 
Tor just marked as a dark line on the shore; on the east the vast 
cluster of what is commonly called Sinai, with the peaks of St. 
Catherine; and, towering high above all, the less famous, but most 
magnificent of all, the Monl Blanc of those parts, the unknown and 
unvisited Um-Shomer, Every feature of the extraordinary con¬ 
formation lies before you; the w&dys coursing and winding in every 
direction; the long crescent of the Wady Es-Sheykh; the infinite 
number of mountains like a model; their colours all as clearly dis¬ 
played as in Bussegger's geological map, which we had in our hands at 
the moment; the dark granite, the brown sandstone, the yellow Desert, 
the dots of vegetation along the Wady Eeiran, and the one green 
spot of the great palm-grove (if so it be) of Eephidim. On the 
northern and somewhat lower eminence are the visible remains of a 
building, which, like the stairs of stones mentioned before, may be 
of any date, from Moses to Burckhardt. It consists of granite 
fragments cemented with lime and mortar. In the centre is a rough 
hole, and close beside it, on the granite rocks, are three of those 
mysterious inscriptions, which, whatever they mean elsewhere, must 
mean here that this summit was frequented by unknown pilgrims, who 
used those characters; the more so, as the like inscriptions were scat¬ 
tered at intervals, through the whole ascent. A point of rock imme¬ 
diately below this ruin was the extreme edge of the peak. It was flanked 
on each side by the tremendous precipices of the two neighbouring 
peaks—itself as precipitous—and as we saw them overlooking the 
circle of Desert—plain, hill and valley, it was impossible not to feel 
that for the giving of the Law to Israel and the world, the scene 
was most truly fitted. I say “ for the giving of the Law,” because 
the objections urged from the absence of any plain immediately 
under the mountain for receiving the Law, are unanswerable, 
or could only be answered if no such plain existed elsewhere 
in the Peninsula. 

The point to which we ascended is doubtless the same as that 
described by Burckhardt, though it is difficult to reconcile the 
“three inscriptions” which we saw, with the "many” described by 
him, or the comparative ease of our ascent, with the immense fatigue 
of which he speaks. This last, however, may be accounted for by 
the fact that he ascended without a guide; whereas we had the 


PENINSULA OF SINAI. 


73 


assistance of the very intelligent Sheykh Zeddan, sheykh of Serb&l, 
whom we found in the Wady 'Aleyat; with the clever boy, Fred, son 
of Sheykh Hassan, sheykh of the village in the same wady. He 
answered the names of all the mountains and wadys at a touch, 
[and it may be here interesting to give his version, as communicated 
through our dragoman, of the ruins and traditions of Peiran and 
Serbal. In reply to the question suggested by BuppelFs 1 assertion 
of the estimation in which Serbal was held by the Bedouins, as 
shown by sacrifices on its summit, he returned the following decisive 
answer: “ Arabs never pray or kill sheep on the top of Serbal; 
sometimes, however, travellers eat chiclce7is there. The ruined build¬ 
ing on the top was built by the Pranks, or by the Derkani, the 
original inhabitants of the country, for keeping treasures. The 
ruins in Wady Peiran are also by Pranks. There used to be a 
Prank windmill on the north-east side of the valley, and corn was 
carried across from the convent by a rope. - ”] 

It was already dark by the time that we reached our encampment 
at the eastern extremity of the Wady Peiran. It was a beautiful 
sight to see on our way the mountains lit' up from top to bottom 
with the red blaze which shot up from the watchfires of the Bedouin 
tents. So they must have shone before the Pillar of Pire. The 
palm-groves of Peiran I saw only by the clear starlight; yet it was 
still possible to see how great must be the beauty of the luxuriant 
palms and feathery tamarisks—the wide glades below, the vast 
mountains above. 

VIII.-APPROACH TO GEBEL MOUSA, THE TRADITIONAL SINAI. 

We started at 5 a.m. The camels went round by Wady Es- 
Sheykh; we took the direct route by Wady Solab, which, passing 
by several deserted Bedouin villages of the Arab serfs of the 
convent, with their lonely burial-grounds, brought us to the foot of 
the Nakb Howy, the -“Pass of the Wind,” a stair of rock, like 
that by which we had mounted to the cluster of Serbal, and by 
which we were to mount again into the second and highest stage of 
the great mountain labyrinth. Its entrance is formed by the white 
alluvial formations before mentioned, as if left by the great streams 
of the central mountains when they first burst forth to feed the 
lower plains and valleys of the Wady Peiran ; this being the opening 
into the dark range we had seen in the distance from the top of 
Serbal. The pass itself is what would be elsewhere a roaring 
torrent, like the Pass of St. Gothard. It is amidst masses of rock, 
a thread of a stream just visible, and here and there forming clear 
pools, shrouded in palms. On many of these rocky fragments are 
Sinaitic inscriptions, mostly with crosses. The steep pass is broken 

1 See Part I. p. 40. 


74 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


in part by long green swells as of tufa. At its summit, the course 
of the stream is still traceable from time to time by rushes. 

We reached the head of the pass; and far in the bosom of the 
mountains before us, I saw the well-known shapes of the cliffs 
which form the front of Sinai. At each successive advance these 
cliffs disengaged themselves from the intervening and surround¬ 
ing hills, and at last they stood out—I should rather say the 
columnar mass, which they form, stood out—alone against the sky. 
On each side the infinite complications of twisted and jagged moun¬ 
tains fell away from it. On each side the sky encompassed it round, 
as though it were alone in the wilderness. And to this giant mass 
we approached through a wide valley, a long continued plain, which 
enclosed as it was between two precipitous mountain ranges of black 
and yellow granite, and having always at its end this prodigious 
mountain block, I could compare to nothing else than the immense 
avenue,—the “ dromos,” as it is technically called,—through which 
the approach was made to the great Egyptian temples. One 
extraordinary sensation was the foreknowledge at each successive 
opening of the view of every object that would next appear; as 
cliff and plain, and the deep gorges on each side, and lastly the 
Convent with its gardens burst before me, it was the unfolding of 
the sight of sights, of which I had read and heard for years, till 
each part of it seemed as familiar as if I had seen it again and 
again. Was it the same or not ? The colours, and the scale of the 
scene, were not precisely what I should have gathered from descrip¬ 
tions ; the colours less remarkable, the scale less grand. But the whole 
impression of that long approach was even more wonderful than I had 
expected. Whatever may have been the scene of the events in Exodus, 
I cannot imagine that any human being could pass up that plain and 
not feel that he was entering a place above all others suited for 
the most august of the sights of earth. We encamped outside 
the Convent, at the point where the great Wady Es-Sheykh falls 
into the Wady Er-Baheh, immediately under the corner of the 
cliff. 


IX.—ASCENT OF GEBEL MOTJSA AND OF RaS SASAFEH. 

The next day we started for Gebel Mousa, the Mountain of 
Moses, the traditional scene of the Giving of the Law. I shall not 
go through all the steps of the well-known ascent. There were 
two points which especially struck me. Eirst, the little plain just 
before the last ascent. The long flight of rude steps, which leads 
from the base to the summit, winding through crags of granite, at 
last brings you in sight of a grand archway standing between two of 
these huge cliffs, somewhat like that by which you enter the desert 
of the Chartreuse. You pass this, and yet another, and.then find 


PENINSULA OF SINAI. 


75 


yourself in that world-renowned spot. 1 The tall cypress, which 
stands in the centre, had already appeared towering above the rocks 
before we came in sight of the whole. There is a ruined church on 
the slope of the hill, built over the so-called cave of Elijah, and a 
well and a tank on the other, also ascribed to him. It is a solemn 
and beautiful scene, entirely secluded, and entirely characteristic, 
with the exception of the cypress, which marks the hand of strangers. 
Next, the summit itself, whatever else may be its claims, bears on its 
front the marks of being, or having been, regarded as the spot most 
universally sacred on earth. For there, side by side, and from 
reverence for the same event on which both religions are founded, 
stand the ruins of a small Christian church, once divided amongst 
all the Christian sects, and of a small Mahometan mosque. From 
whatever point we saw this famous peak, these two fragments of 
worship, almost always visible upon it, more distinctly than any¬ 
thing else told what it was. And now for the question which 
every one asks on that consecrated spot. Is this “ the top of the 
mount ” described in Exodus, 2 or must we seek it elsewhere ? The 
whole question turns on another question, whether there is a plain 
below it agreeing with the words of the narrative. Dr. Robinson, who 
has the merit of discovering first that magnificent approach which I 
have before described on the other side of the mountain, declares 
not; but Laborde and others have so confidently maintained that 
there was a large and appropriate place for the encampment below 
this peak, that I was fully prepared to find it, and to believe in the 
old tradition. This impression is so instantly overthrown by 
the view of the Wady Seb'ayeh, as one looks down upon it from the 
precipice of Gebel Mousa, that it must be at once abandoned in 
favour of the view of the great approach before described, unless 
either the view of the plain of Er-Raheh was less imposing from 
above than it was from below, or the plain of Seb'ayeh more 
imposing from below than it was from above. The first thing to 
be done was, therefore, to gain the summit of the other end of the 
range called the Ras Sasafeh (Willow Head), overlooking the 
Er-Raheh from above. The whole party descended, and after 
winding through the various basins and cliffs which make up the 
range, we reached the rocky point overlooking the approach we 
had come the preceding day. The effect on us, as on every one 
who has seen and described it, was instantaneous. It was like the 
seat on the top of Serbal, but with the difference, that here was the 
deep wide yellow plain sweeping down to the very base of the cliffs; 
exactly answering to the plain on which the people “ removed 
and stood afar off." . . . There is yet a higher mass of granite 
immediately above this point, which should be ascended, for the 

1 I cannot forbear to refer to the description of it in “ Tancred.” 

2 Exod. xix. 20. 


76 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


greater completeness of view which it affords.—The plain below is 
then seen extending not only between the ranges of Tlaha and 
Furei'a, but also into the lateral valleys, which, on the north-east, 
unite it with the wide Wady of the Sheykh. This is important as 
showing how far the encampment may have been spread below, still 
within sight of the same summit. Behind extends the granite mass 
of the range of Gebel Mousa, cloven into deep gullies and basins, 
and ending in the traditional peak, crowned by the memorials 
of its double sanctity. The only point which now remained 
was to explore the Wady Seb'ayeh on the other side, and ascertain 
whether its appearance and its relation to Gebel Mousa from below 
was more suitable than it had seemed from above. This I did on the 
afternoon of the third day, and I came to the conclusion, that 
it could only be taken for the place if none other existed. It 
is rough, uneven, narrow. The only advantage which it has is, that 
the peak from a few points of view rises in a more commanding 
form than the Has Sasafeh. But the mountain never descends 
upon the plain. No! If we are to have a mountain without a 
wide amphitheatre at its base, let us have Serbal; but, if otherwise, 
I am sure that if the monks of Justinian had fixed the traditional 
scene on the Has Sasafeh, no one would for an instant have doubted 

that this only could be the spot.Considering 

the almost total absence of such conjunctions of plain and mountain 
in this region, it is a really important evidence to the truth of the 
narrative, that one such conjunction can be found, and that within 
the neighbourhood of the traditional Sinai. Nor can I say that the 
degree of uncertainty, which must hang over it, materially dimi¬ 
nished my enjoyment of it. In fact, it is a great safeguard for 
the real reverence due to the place, as the scene of the first great 
revelation of God to man. As it is, you may rest on your general 
conviction, and be thankful. 

[This question between the two points of the range of Gebel 
Mousa assumes more importance on the spot than it deserves. On 
a careful consideration of the traditional statements, it seems very 
doubtful whether the scene of the Giving of the Law to the people 
as we now conceive it, ever entered into the minds of those who 
fixed the traditional site. The consecrated peak of Gebel Mousa 
was probably revered simply as the spot where Moses saw the vision 
of God, without reference to any more general event.] See Part I. 
pp. 32, 44, 58. 


X.-ASCENT OF ST. CATHERINE. 

The next day we ascended the highest peak, not of the whole 
peninsula, but of the Sinai range. Its whole historical or legendary 
interest depends on the story from which it derives its name, that the 



PENINSULA OF SINAI. 


77 


angels bore St. Catherine's body from Alexandria over the Red Sea 
and Desert, and placed it on this mountain-top. 1 It is a noble moun¬ 
tain, and glorious was the view from the top. It embraces not only 
the labyrinth of bare granite peaks which you see from Gebel Mousa, 
but a panorama over the whole peninsula. Once more we saw 
Serbal itself; once more, and now nearer at hand, the masses of 
Um-Shomer; and (what we could not see from Serbal), both the 
gulfs of the Red Sea, beautifully blue, with the high mountains of 
Egypt and Arabia beyond. Most complete, too, was the view of 
Gebel Mousa below; the reddish granite of its lower mass ending in 
the grey green granite of the peak itself. 

[The points embraced in the several views from Gebel Mousa, Ras 
Sas&feh, and St. Catherine have been so fully described by Dr. 
Robinson, that it would be superfluous to add any details of my own. 
I will confine myself to points which he has omitted, or which have 
been questioned. 1. Dr. Wilson, Miss Martineau, and Laborde, in 
contradiction to Dr. Robinson, assert that from one or both of the 
two former points Serbal is visible. He is right, and they are wrong. 
What they took for Serbal is the double peak of El-Banat (see p. 31). 
2. Dr. Robinson does not notice the very high mountain visible from 
St. Catherine, south-west of Um-Shomer, and apparently calculated 
by Ruppell to be the highest in the Peninsula. We could not 
ascertain its name. It is possibly that called by Burckhardt (p. 576) 
"Thomman," or "El Koly." 3. No traveller has adequately 
described the beauty of the great ravine by which St. Catherine is 
ascended, under the name of " Shuk Mousa," "the Cleft of 
Moses." And Lepsius, in particular, has much underrated the 
amount of water produced generally by the springs of this cluster, 
especially by the spring in this cleft, which sends down a regular 
brook through the whole of the Leja.] 

XI.—ASCENT OF THE GEBEL-ED-DEIU. 

[This mountain is the only one of the group immediately around 
the Convent which had never been explored. 2 Eor this reason, 
amongst others, we made the ascent, and for this reason I here give 
the account of it. It bears the various names of Gebel-ed-Deir, 
" the Mountain of the Convent," from the nunnery which once 
existed there—"Gebel Bestin," from "St. Episteme," the first 
abbess of the nunnery,—" Solab," the Cross, from the cross which 
stands on its summit;—of "the Burning Bush," from the story 
already given. 3 "We went up with two Bedouin boys, belonging 
to the serfs of the Convent:— The name’ of the eldest was 
Saleh, of the younger, Hamadan. Like all the young guides 

1 See Part I. p. 45. 

2 Bitter ; Sinai, p. 544. 


Part I. p. 46. 


78 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


(1.) Tomb 
of Sheykk 
Saleh. 


attached to the monastery, they were remarkably intelligent ; and 
though they had never been to the summit before, found their way 
with great sagacity. The ascent took three hours : it was steep, but 
the granite was sufficiently rough to afford hold and footing. In the 
recesses between the peaks was a ruined Bedouin village. On the 
highest level was a small natural basin, thickly covered with shrubs 
of myrrh,—of all the spots of the kind that I saw, the best suited 
for the feeding of Jethro's flocks in the seclusion of the mountain. 
Prom this, through the rock, a deep narrow cleft opens straight 
down upon the Convent, which lies far below, like a collection of 
houses of card or cork, with the leaden roof of the church standing 
athwart them. This, doubtless, is the explanation of the legend of 
the miraculous sun-beam. The highest point of all is a little above 
this, reached by clambering over blocks of granite,—and is covered 
by the .rude wooden cross which gives the mountain its name, and 
stands out in the blue sky, a strange sight in the Arabian wilder¬ 
ness. Prom this point, St. Catherine and Gebel Mousa are both 
visible; also beyond St. Catherine, the long line of peaks, which we 
saw from thence; and amongst them rose the tall pyramidal mountain, 
of which we were still in doubt whether it was Um-Shomer. A light 
cloud veiled the summit of Has Sasafeh. This is the only spot 
which commands the view both of the Wady Seb'ayeh and of the 
Wady Er-Eaheh. In other respects, it is inferior to any of the other 
four mountain views we saw: less extensive than Serbal or St. 
Catherine, less wild than Gebel Mousa, and less imposing than Eas 
Sasafeh. Thence we descended by a path on the south-west to the 
ruins of the nunnery, called ‘ Magarefeh' (‘ Security'), which was 
under a steep rock, and above a little spring, or stream. Steps of 
broken stones, like those on the ascent of Gebel Mousa, lead from 
thence to the Wady Ed-Deir. In the course of the descent, we came 
to a precipitous granite rock, so smooth as to render it almost im¬ 
possible to pass down its surface; the boys, with much ingenuity, 
turned the difficulty by discovering a fissure, through which we could 
creep underneath it."] 


XII.—ROUTE PROM SINAI TO 'AKABA. 

The approach to Sinai from the west has been so often described, 
that I have hitherto only given the general outline contained in 
the letters. But the descent to the east has been so seldom and 
so erroneously delineated both in books and maps, that I venture to 
add here a few words from my journal. 

[On leaving the Convent, the road soon falls into the crescent of 
the Wady Es-Sheykh,—which widens till it opens into a large plain. 
In the midst of this was a small chapel, with a white conical roof, 



PENINSULA OF SINAI. 


79 


containing the tomb of Sheykh Saleh, who gives his name to the 
wady. Round it are a collection of small gravestones. He was, 
according to the Bedouins with us, one of the Souabis, or com¬ 
panions of the Prophet, ‘ in the time of Mousa and Mohammed ,* and 
attended the latter, and was buried on the journey ,—‘ as if—excuse 
me—one of you, masters, fell sick, and died, and was buried/ f The 
tomb is still visited by all the Towara Arabs, and by them alone/ 
‘ The burial-place belongs to them/ ‘ Bedouins, not of the Towara, 
however near, could not be buried here/ The Arabs who accompa¬ 
nied us (here and here only on the journey) began to mutter prayers 
as they approached. They (with our own Mohammed) stood for a 
few minutes, saying a few prayers or addresses to the dead saint, 
with a great appearance of solemnity, and then entered the hovel. 
The Saint is buried in the floor. His wooden coffin, with a 
wooden handle to mark the head, closed with a lid above,—is 
supposed to be above the grave. This is covered with cloth—and 
sticks are rudely put up round it, hung with old rags and shawls. 
‘ If they were of Cashmere, no one would take them/ The one 
Bedouin who entered with us knelt down, and taking dust from the 
coffin, threw it on his head. One by one they all entered, but with 
a kind of delicacy waiting till we had left it. 

Prom this point we struck off from the Wady Es-Sheykli, leaving 
it to pursue its winding course towards the Wady Peiran,—and 
went up the Wady Souwyrah,—near the spring of Abou Souwyrah, 
whence the Bedouins fetched water. Up the Nakb-Souwyrah,—an 
abrupt, but not high or difficult pass into the wady or wide broad plain 
of El-Wah, the watershed between the cluster of Sinai and 'Akaba. 
Prom this pass, and from this plain, the backward view of the 
Sinai mountains was very fine,—St. Catherine, and at times Gebel 
Mousa and Ras Sasafeh towering above the rest; and in front 
a long bulwark of black and jagged peaks, like the Grampians. 

Prom this plain we descended into the Wady Sayal,—so called, 
apparently, from a few scattered acacias, the first we have seen since 
leaving the Wady Solab. This wady is a continuous descent, between 
high granite rocks, occasionally red—sometimes like the deep red of 
old brick. In this we encamped. The next day it widened, and 
the acacias increased into spreading, mazy thorns. A sharp storm 
of rain, the only one we experienced in our whole journey, swept 
from the Sinai range, during which we took shelter under a f Retem/ 
or broom. The shrubs on the ground were myrrh (ser), a yellow 
flowering shrub, called “Abi-rathin,” and a blue thorny plant, called 
“ Silleh.” The hills here are of a conical shape, curiously slant¬ 
ing across each other, and with an appearance of serpentine and 
basalt. The wady, still bearing the same name, then mounted a 
short rocky pass—of hills capped with sandstone—and entered on 
a plain of deep sand—the first we had encountered—over which 


(2.) Wady 
Sayal. 


80 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


were scattered isolated clumps of sandstone, with occasional chalk— 
to which the Arabs gave the name of “*Adjerat-el-Earous." On 
two of these rocks were Sinaitic inscriptions ; one with animals, one 
without. At the close of this plain, an isolated rock, called by the 
Bedouins “ Herimet Haggag," “ Aboutig Suleman," “ Kel'et ’ Ab¬ 
dallah,"—its high tiers rising out of lower tiers, like a castle. Almost 
all round the lower tier are inscriptions, some Sinaitic, some Arab, 
two or three Greek,—many animals, some recent, but the greater 
part of the same colour as the inscriptions,—and chiefly ibexes, 
with enormous horns, overlapping the whole body like a rainbow;— 
also camels and ostriches. 1 

Leaving this rock,—and leaving also the level ranges of El-Tih, 
which now rose in front,—we turned down from the Maharid-el- 
Huderah,—the e network/ so called from the extreme complication 
of small isolated masses—through a sandy desert, amidst fantastic 
sandstone rocks, mixed with lilac and dull green, as if of tufa. 
Here were some more inscriptions,—and here we encamped. Above 
the encampment was a crumbling sandstone ridge, which commanded 
the last great view, and almost equal in beauty to any that we had 
seen in the Sinaitic peninsula. On the south-west was the whole Sinai 
range. Um-Shomer and St. Catherine were veiled in cloud,—but 
Serbal and El-Banat were just visible,—the first like one dot, the 
second, with its double peak, like two dots, on the far horizon. On 
the north-west were the level ridges of the Till: on the east was the 
vast and beautiful outline of Arabian mountains on the other side of 
the Gulf of *Akaba, with yet another range beyond them, rising as if 
to a very great height. The near view was of sand, isolated 
sandstone hills, and the green and purple hill on which we stood. 

At 7.30 a.m. we started through deep sand, 2 —and what Dr. 
Robinson well calls “ fragments of the Tih,"—over a flat plain, called 
by the Arabs RidMn-es-Shua*aa. This presently contracted into a 
valley (Wady Ghazaleh), winding, like the Wady Sayal, between high 
granite rocks. At 9.30, the Wady Huderah fell into it from the 
north-west, and the Wady Ghazaleh now opened into another and a 
still more tortuous valley, which, from first to last, was called by the 
Arabs the Wady-el-* Ain —“ of the Spring." The spring, or brook, 
which gives it its name, is a rill of clear fresh water, which descends 
into it, winding through a winding ravine from the west; its course 
marked by rushes, the large-leaved plant called “ Esher," tama¬ 
risks, and wild palms. A venerable group of these last stands 
near the entrance of the brook into the Wady El-*Ain, the rough 
stems springing up from one vast shaggy root,—the branches, dead 
and living, hanging over in a tangled canopy. As it descends into 
the wady, it spreads out its stream with more rushes and more 


Compare Burckhardt, 505, 506. See Part I. p. 60. 


2 See Part I. p. 9. 


PENINSULA OP SINAI. 


81 


palms. The rocks rise, red granite or black basalt, occasionally 
tipped as if with castles of sandstone, to the height of about 1000 
feet. They are absolutely bare, except where the green “lasaf” 
or caper plant springs from the clefts. Occasionally they over¬ 
lap and narrow the valley greatly. Finally they open on the 
sea—the high Arabian mountains rising beyond. At the mouth of 
the pass are many traces of flood—trees torn down, and strewed 
along the sand. 

This pass is certainly one of the most striking scenes in the Penin¬ 
sula. It is well described by Riippell and by Miss Martineau, under 
the name of the Wady Wettir, which is a name sometimes given to 
the lower portion of it, from a ravine of that name which falls into 
it from the north, shortly after the reception of the brook. Laborde 
also passed through it on his return from Petra, but, singularly 
enough, without a word of remark on its unparalleled beauty. In 
all the maps of Sinai—least so in that of Palmer—and in most of 
the descriptions of this route, there prevails considerable confusion 
on this point. The following statement, founded on our own 
observation, and on a careful examination of the Sheykli M'Dochal, 
who accompanied us, may be relied upon. The spring of Huderah 
is distinct from the spring El-Win, and is at the head of the Wady 
Iiuderah, a little to the N. of the great rock of Herimet Haggag. 
Dr. Robinson came down the Wady Huderah, crossed the Wady 
Ghazaleh, and passed through the Wady Sumghy, which enters on 
the sea shore about an hour south of the Wady El-Win. It is his 
statement, founded on hearsay, that the Wady El-Win was a day and a 
half distant, which has misled all modern maps into placing it much 
too far north.] 


HAZEROTH. 

Besides the interest of the physical peculiarities of this 
route is the faint probability that this beautiful valley and 
its neighbourhood may have been the scene of the first 
long halt after the departure from Sinai. After Taberah 
and Kibroth-Hattaavah, the people “abode” “for seven 
days,” at least, in Hazeroth. 1 Burckhardt, and most 
travellers after him, have, from the resemblance of the 
two radical letters in the two words, identified this with 
Huderah. Such a conjecture must be very uncertain, the 
more so as the name of Hazeroth is one the least likely to 
be attached to any permanent or natural feature of the 

1 Numb. xi. 35; xii. 15, 16. The arguments are well stated in Ritter; Sinai, 
251, 261, 270. 

Q 


82 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


Desert. It means simply the “ enclosures,” 1 such as 
may still be seen in the Bedouin villages, hardly less 
transitory than tents. Three points, however, may be 
mentioned, as slightly confirmatory of the hypothesis 
that the Israelite route lay in these valleys. First, 
the brook of El-’Ain, as its name implies, is empha¬ 
tically “ the water,” “ the spring,” of this region of the 
Desert, and must therefore have attracted round it any 
nomadic settlements, such as are implied in the name of 
Hazeroth, and such as that of Israel must have been. If 
they descended at all to the western shores of the Gulf of 
'Akaba, this is the most natural spot for them to have 
selected for a long halt. Secondly, in the murmurs pre¬ 
vious to their arrival at Hazeroth, “ the sea ” is twice 
mentioned, in a manner which may indicate its proximity, 
and which is therefore certainly more appropriate to 
these valleys touching on the Gulf of ’Akaba, than to the 
more inland route over the Tih. “ Shall the flocks and 
the herds be slain for them, to suffice them \ or shall all 
the fish of the sea be gathered together, to suffice them V’ 2 
“ There went forth a wind from the Lord, and brought 
quails from the sea.” 3 Thirdly, in connection with this 
incident of the “ quails,” may be mentioned the fact, that 
on the evening and the morning of our encampment, 
immediately before reaching the Wady Huderah, the sky 
was literally darkened by the flight of innumerable birds, 
which proved to be the same large red-legged cranes, 
three feet high, with black and white wings, measuring 
seven feet from tip to tip, which we had seen in like 
numbers at the First Cataract of the Nile. It is re¬ 
markable that a similar flight was seen by Schubert near 
the very same spot. That any large flights of birds 
should be seen in those parts at any rate illustrates the 
Scripture narrative. But if a recent 4 explanation of the 
difficult passage in Numbers xi. 31, be correct, and the 

1 For the name, see Appendix. especial subject of which he is there 

2 Numb. xi. 22; see Ritter, 327. speaking. But I am unwilling to with- 

3 Numb. xi. 31. hold this slight illustration of almost the 

4 Mr. Forster’s Voice of Sinai, p. 108. only conclusion in that work which 
I do not mean to guarantee the ac- received any confirmation from my 
curacy of his translation, or the ap- observations. 

plicability of his remarks to the 


PENINSULA OF SINAI. 


83 


expression “ two cubits high upon the face of the earth/’ 
be applied, not to the accumulation of the mass, but to the 
size of the individual birds ; the flight of cranes, such as we 
saw, may be not merely an illustration, but an instance, of 
the incident recorded in the Pentateuch, and the frequency 
of the phenomenon in this locality may serve to show that 
Kibroth-Hattaavah and Huderah were not far distant. 


XIII.—GULF OF 'AKABA. 

Down this valley then, through these splendid rocks we rode, 
till at last, opening more widely than before, they disclosed the blue 
waters of the Gulf. Dromedaries, Bedouins, all set off in a race, 
each Bedouin urging on the dromedary of his master; and after 
half an hour's gallop we arrived on the shore. The next day, and 
the next, were along the shore of the sea almost the whole way. It 
is the Gulf of Elath and Ezion-Geber, up and down which the 
fleets of Solomon brought the gold of Ophir: the great channel of 
commerce till it was diverted by Alexandria to the Gulf of Suez. 
The two gulfs seem, like Castor and Pollux, to have risen and set 
alternately. Now there is not a single boat upon it from end to 
end. Once a year, and once only, boats come round from Suez to 
'Akaba with provisions for the Mecca pilgrims; at all other times it 
is desolate as the wilderness. But what a sea ! and what a shore ! 

From the dim silvery mountains on the further Arabian coast, 
over the blue waters of the sea, melting into colourless clearness as 
they roll up the shelly beach,—that beach red with the red sand, or 
red granite gravel that pours down from the cliffs above,—those 
cliffs sometimes deep red, sometimes yellow and purple, and above 
them all the blue cloudless sky of Arabia. And the sight of the 
shore at once reveals why this sea, in common with the Indian 
Ocean, was called Red by the Greeks, and the Sea of Weeds by the 
Hebrews. Of the red sand and rocks I have spoken; but, besides 
these, fragments of red coral are for ever being thrown up from the 
stores below, and it is these coralline forests which form the true 
“ weeds" 1 of this fantastic sea. But, above all, never did I see such 
shells. Far as your eye can reach you see the beach whitening with 
them, like bleaching bones; and as you break them under your 
dromedary’s feet, they are like the earthenware on Monte Testaccio, 
only, instead of broken pottery, like white porcelain. These are 
the larger ones; but there are smaller ones, of every size, and shape, 
and colour; sometimes, too, the trunks of trees of white coral. 


g 2 


1 See Part I. pp. 5, 6. 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


shooting their roots through the sand, the upper branches gone, 
but still showing what these trees must be in the depths below. 
On the second day we had to leave the shore to cross a high mountain 
pass (Nakb-Muheymerat), by a very rugged path, the highest and 
roughest that we have seen; the line of camels, going in single fde, 
extended almost from top to bottom. It is important, because, being 
the only means of reaching the head of the gulf, it proves either that 
the Israelites could not have come our route, or that no pass which 
we have seen in Sinai would have impeded their march to any point 
in the Peninsula. 

It was about four p.m. that we reached ’Akaba. 'Akaba is a 
wretched village, shrouded in a palm-grove at the north end of 
the Gulf, gathered round a fortress built for the protection of the 
Mecca pilgrimage; into whose route we here again fell for the first 
time since we left it at 'Ajerud, which is guarded by a fort like this. 
This is the whole object of the present existence of 'Akaba, which 
stands on the site of the ancient Elath,—“the Palm-Trees,” so 
called from the grove. 1 Its situation, however, is very striking, 
looking down the beautiful gulf, with its jagged ranges on each 
side: on the west is the great black pass down which the pil¬ 
grimage descends, and from which 'Akaba (“the Pass”) derives 
its name; on the north opens the wide plain, or Desert Yalley, 
wholly different in character from anything we have seen, still called 
as it was in the days of Moses, “ the 'Arabah.” Down this came 
the Israelites on their return from Kadesh, and through a gap up 
the eastern hills they finally turned off to Moab. On this view they 
undoubtedly looked. It was a new Bed Sea for them, and they 
little knew the glory which it would acquire when it became the 
channel of all the wealth of Solomon. 


XIV.—THE *ARABAH. 

Our journey for the first two days was along the wide and desert 
valley of the 'Arabah. It is one great peculiarity of the whole of 
the passage through the Desert, that every day you pass over a 
battle-field of historical or topographical controversy; not the 
Eorum of Borne is more fertile in such disputes. In this great 
yalley there is no more question of the course of the Israelites. It 
is indeed doubtful whether they passed up it on their way to Canaan, 
but no one can doubt that they passed down it, when the valleys 
of Edom were closed against them. But the geographical contro¬ 
versy, of which the 'Arabah is the scene, though it has or ought to 
have been set at rest in its essential points by the comparative levels 

1 See Part I. p. 22. There is nothing to fix the site of Ezion-Geber, “the 
Giant s Backbone.” 





PENINSULA OF SINAI. 


of the Gulf of 'Akaba and the Lake of Gennesareth, still remains 
unsettled in its lesser details. 

[For this reason it may be worth while to give a few notes 
of its general features, taken at the time. After leaving 'Akaba, 
we entered the Wady 'Arabah, over the mounds, supposed by 
Dr. Robinson to be the remains of Elath. On the east is a 
low gap in the hills with three low peaks visible beyond. 
This is the Wady Ithm, which turns the eastern range of the 
'Arabah, and through which the Israelites must have passed on 
their way to Moab. It is still one of the regular roads to Petra, 
and in ancient times seems to have been the main approach from 
Elath or 'Akaba, as it is the only road from the south which 
enters Petra through the Sik. 1 The only published account of 
it is that of Laborde. These mountains appear to be granite. 
On the west are the limestone ranges of the Tih, horizontal as 
before. Two remarkable wadys appeared in the eastern range, 
after leaving the Wady Ithm. First, the Wady Tubal, where, for 
the first time, red sandstone appeared in the mountains, rising, as in 
the 'Wady El-'Ain, architecture-wise, above gray granite. Of these 
mountains, the most prominent is Gebel Shebibeh, with Wady 
Moahil beneath. The next is Wady Ghurundel, a narrow gorge, 
with a slight brook forming small pools—rushes and dwarf palms 
around—innumerable goats and sheep crowded at the water, led by 
black-veiled Bedouin women. (This Wady must not be con¬ 
founded with the more celebrated valley of the same name in the 
Peninsula of Sinai.) 

It was about four hours after leaving the entrance of Wady 
Ghurundel, and one hour before arriving at the entrance of the 
Wady Abou-Sheykh (leading to Petra), that we arrived at what the 
Sheykh Mohammed 2 pointed out to us] as he had before, it seems, 
pointed out to Mr. Bartlett [what he considered as the division of 
the waters between the Gulf of 'Akaba and the Dead Sea. Two 
circumstances always make it difficult for travellers positively to 
ascertain this point. First, the slope in the level of the 'Arabah from 
east to west, which distorts the course of the torrents, and makes it 
almost impossible to distinguish whether they descend in a northerly 
or a southerly direction; secondly, the difficulty of traversing the 
'Arabah (when in a caravan) directly from east to west. The ridge in 
question was a long line of hills, formed apparently of a detritus of 
stone and sand, called "Chragi-er-Rishi" ("Saddlebags of feathers"), 


1 See p. 89. 

2 Sheykh Mohammed is the eldest son 
of the celebrated Sheykh of the Alouins, 
Hussayn. His father, now advancing in 
years, deputed his son to escort us ; and 
I feel bound to mention the almost princely 


courtesy which he showed to us during the 
journey. I have purposely omitted all 
account of the often repeated, though 
to those concerned always interesting, 
negotiations with the old chief himself 
at ’Akaba. 






86 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


wliicli ran due west along the 'Arabali. Just before reaching these 
was the first view of Mount Hor, and on ascending them we looked 
back for the last time over the southern 'Arabali, which from this 
point looks like a waste of sand; whereas, when in it, the shrubs at 
times give it almost the appearance of a jungle. The wide opening 
to the sea is also visible from hence, though not the sea itself. In 
the midst of these hills, or rather of the undulations formed by 
their summits, ail intersected by lesser watercourses, is one broad 
watercourse, running from east to west, called Wady Howar, i. e., 
“the division.” 

It is this which Sheykh Mohammed declares to be the water¬ 
shed, and which, he maintains, “ shuts out ” the waters of the Gulf 
of 'Akaba from side to side.] 

XV.—APPROACH TO PETRA. 

The whole prospect changes at this point. We lose the opening 
of the valley into the Gulf of 'Akaba, and we gain the view 
of Mount Hor,—the “Mountain of Aaron,” as it is still called. 
Behind it lies Petra, and to Petra, through fantastic rocks, we turned 
aside, and encamped at last at the entrance of the pass, and waited 
for the morning. One isolated rock, with an excavation inside, in 
front of the hill, indicated the region we were approaching, appa¬ 
rently an outpost for a sentinel,—perhaps the very one which the 
Prophet had in his eye in that well-known text, “Watchman, what 
of the night?” 1 

And now arose the strange feeling of arriving at a place which it 
was possible we might be prevented by force from entering, or have 
by force to enter. Pifty years hence, when our friend Sheykh 
Mohammed has put down the surrounding tribes, Petra will have 
lost half its interest; but now the failures and dangers are sufficiently 
recent to form part of the first impression of the place. It is literally 
“ paved with the good intentions ” of travellers, unfulfilled. There, 
was Mount Hor, which Robinson and Laborde in vain wished to 
ascend; there, the plain half-way, where Burckhardt was obliged to 
halt without reaching the top; here the temple which Irby and 
Mangles only saw through their telescope; here the platform from 
which the Martineau party were unable to stir without an armed 
guard; and, lastly, on the very plain of our encampment, at the 
entrance of the pass, travellers with our own dragoman were driven 
back last year without even a glimpse of the famous city. 

XVI.—ASCENT OF MOUNT HOR. 

We ascended the pass early in the morning; and leaving the 
1 Isaiah xxi. 11. “He calleth to me out of Seir.” 


PENINSULA OF SINAI. 


87 


camels and tents to go on to Petra, turned to climb the summit of 
Mount Hor. 

It is one of the very few spots connected with the wanderings of 
the Israelites, which admits of no reasonable doubt. 1 There Aaron 
died in the presence of Moses and Eleazer; there he was buried; 
and there Eleazer was invested with the priesthood in his stead. 
The mountain is marked far and near by its double top, which rises 
like a huge castellated building from a lower base, and on one of 
these is the Mahometan chapel erected out of the remains of some 
earlier and more sumptuous building, over the supposed grave. 
There was nothing of interest within; only the usual marks of 
Mussulman devotion, ragged shawls, ostrich eggs, and a few beads. 
These were in the upper chamber. The great High-priest, if his 
body be really there, rests in a subterraneous vault below, hewn out of 
the rock, and in a niche now cased over with stone, wood, and plaster. 
From the flat roof of the chapel we overlooked his last view—that 
view which was to him what Pisgah was to his brother. To us the 
northern end was partly lost in haze; but we saw all the main 
points on which his eye must have rested. He looked over the 
valley of the 'Arabah, countersected by its hundred watercourses, 
and beyond, over the white mountains of the wilderness they had 
so long traversed; and at the northern edge of it, there must 
have been visible the heights through which the Israelites had 
vainly attempted to force their way into the Promised Land. This 
was the western view. Close around him on the east were the rugged 
mountains of Edom, and far along the horizon the wide downs of 
Mount Seir, through which the passage had been denied by the 
wild tribes of Esau who hunted over their long slopes. A dreary 
moment, and a dreary scene,—such at any rate it must have seemed 
to the aged priest. 

The peculiarity of the view was the combination of wide extension 
with the scarcity of marked features and points on which to observe. 
Petra itself is entirely shut out by the intervening rocks. Put the 
survey of the Desert on one side, and the mountains of Edom on the 
other, is complete; and of these last the great feature is the mass 
of red bald-headed sandstone rocks, intersected, not by valleys, 
but by deep seams. In the heart of these rocks, itself in¬ 
visible, lies Petra. Beyond spreads the range of yellow downs, 
tufted with vegetation, now called Sherah. And now to Petra let 
us descend. 


1 The proofs of the identity of “ Gebel 
Haroun,” as it is now called, with 
Mount Hor, are (1). The situation “ by 
the coast of the land of Edom,” where it 
is emphatically “the mountain” (Hor). 
Numb. xx. 23. (2). The statement of 


Josephus (Ant. IV. iv. 7), that Aaron’s 
death occurred on a high mountain en¬ 
closing Petra. (3). The modern name 
and traditional sanctity of the mountain 
as connected with Aaron’s tomb. 






88 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


XVII.—PETRA. 1 

The first tiling that struck me in turning out of the 'Arabali 
up the defiles that lead to Petra was, that we had suddenly left the 
Desert. Instead of the absolute nakedness of the Sinaitic valleys, 
we found ourselves walking on grass, sprinkled with flowers, and the 
level platforms on each side were filled with sprouting corn; and this 
continues through the whole descent to Petra, and in Petra itself. 

The next peculiarity was when, after having left the summit of 
the pass, or after descending from Mount Hor, we found ourselves 
insensibly encircled with rocks of deepening and deepening red. 
Bed indeed, even from a distance, the mountains of “ Bed ” Edom 
appear, but not more so than the granite of Sinai; and it is not 
till one is actually in the midst of them that this red becomes crimson, 
and that the wonder of the Petra colours fully displays itself. 

Two mistakes seem to me to have been made in the descriptions. 
All the describers have spoken of bright hues—scarlet, sky-blue, 
orange, &c. Had they taken courage to say instead, “ dull crimson, 
indigo, yellow, and purple,” their account would have lost something 
in effect, but gained much in truth. Nor really would it have lost 
much any way. Eor the colours, though not gaudy,—or rather 
because they are not gaudy,—are gorgeous. You are never, or 
hardly ever, startled by them. You could never mistake them 
for anything else but nature; they seem the natural clothing of 
the place. 

Another mistake is, that the descriptions lead you—or, at least, 
they led me—to suppose that wherever you turn at Petra, you see 
nothing but these wonderful colours. I have already said, that 
from a distance one hardly sees them at all. One sees the general 
contrast only of the red sandstone cliffs standing out against the 
white limestone and yellow downs, which form their higher back¬ 
ground. But when one comes in face of the very cliffs themselves, 
then they are, as I have said, a gorgeous, though dull crimson, 
streaked and suffused with purple. These are the two predominant 
colours ,—“ ferruginous,” perhaps, they might best be called,—and 
on the face of the rocks the only colours. But one striking feature 
of the whole scenery is, that not merely the excavations and buildings, 
but the rocks themselves, are in a constant state of mouldering 
decay. You can scarcely tell where excavation begins and decay 
ends. It is in these caves, and roofs, and recesses, whether natural 

1 I have to apologise for adding another stage in the journey to be altogether 

account of a place so well-known as omitted; and two or three points in the 

Petra now is, through the descriptions of previous descriptions seemed to me to 

Burckhardt, Dr. Robinson, and Miss require corrections or additions. 

Martineau. But it was too important a 


PENINSULA OP SINAI. 


89 


or artificial—very numerous it is true, but not seen till you are close 
within them—that there appears that extraordinary veining and 
intermixture of colours, in which yellow and blue are occasionally 
added—ribbon-like—to red and purple. Of the three comparisons 
usually made—mahogany, raw-flesh, and watered-silk—the last is 
certainly the best. 

This brings me to the third great feature of Petra — its 
excavations. Here again the same error has been committed. I 
had expected to be surrounded by rocks honeycombed with caves. 
By no means. I do not doubt, that by calculation of all in the out¬ 
lying ravines, you might count up thousands; but in the most 
populous part that I could select, I could not number in one view 
more than fifty, and generally much fewer. It is their immense 
ramifications, rather than their concentrated effect, that is remark¬ 
able, and this of course can no more be seen in one view than all 
the streets of London. The larger excavations are temples; the 
others may be divided between modern (i. e., Boman or Arab) 
tombs, and Edomite or Horite 1 habitations. Bound about, or 
rather east and west, are masses of crumbling rock, their faces 
immediately above this mass of ruins cut out into holes, and some¬ 
times with Grecian facades. Of these, the most remarkable are in 
the eastern cliffs, where four of these great excavations, apparently 
not tombs or houses, but temples, stand close together with tiers 
of pillars one above another, giving to that cliff an embattled 
appearance, which, architecturally speaking, is the only remarkable 
feature in the basin of Petra, taken by itself. .... 

But Petra, that is, the mere site of the city, is by far the least 
striking part of Petra. There any one, I think, with highly-raised 
expectations will feel disappointment. In the two points I am 
going to describe, I believe no one. 

Eirst there is the famous defile which, in ancient times, was the 
chief—the only usual—approach to Petra; and I feel so strongly 
the loss of interest which Petra suffers by the present gradual 
entrance, that I would strongly recommend all travellers—even at 
the cost of another day's journey—to come round by this eastern 
approach, through which, though we only saw it reversed, I mean 
now to conduct you, as if entering from the east. 

You descend from those wide downs and those white cliffs which 
I have before described as forming the background of the Bed City 
when seen from the west, and before you opens a deep cleft between 
rocks of red sandstone rising perpendicularly to the height of one, 
two, or three hundred feet. This is the SiJc, or “cleft;" through this 
flows—if one may use the expression—the dry torrent, which, rising 

1 The name of the “ Ho-rim,” who preceded the Edomites (Deut. ii. 22) signifies, 
‘ dwellers in caves.” 





90 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


in the mountains half an hour hence, gives the name by which alone 
Petra is now known amongst the Arabs—Wady Mousa. “ For,”— 
so Sheykh Mohammed tells us—“ as surely as Gebel Harun (the 
Mountain of Aaron) is so called from the burial-place of Aaron, is 
Wady Mousa (the Valley of Moses) so called from the cleft being 
made by the rod of Moses when he brought the stream through 
into the valley beyond.” It is, indeed, a place worthy of the scene, 
and one could long to believe it. Follow me, then, down this mag¬ 
nificent gorge—the most magnificent, beyond all doubt, which I 
have ever beheld. The rocks are almost precipitous, or rather, 
they would be, if they did not, like their brethren in all this region, 
overlap, and crumble, and crack, as if they would crash over you. 
The gorge is about a mile and a half long, and the opening of the 
cliffs at the top is throughout almost as narrow as the narrowest 
part of the defile of Pfeffers, which, in dimensions and form, it more 
resembles than any other of my acquaintance. At its very first 
entrance you pass under the arch which, though greatly broken, 
still spans the chasm—meant apparently to indicate the approach to 
the city. You pass under this along the bed of the torrent, now 
rough with stones, but once a regular paved road like the Appian 
Way, the pavement still remaining at intervals in the bed of the 
stream—the stream, meanwhile, which now has its own wild way, 
being then diverted from its course along troughs hewn in the rock 
above, or conducted through earthenware pipes, still traceable. 
These, and a few niches for statues now gone, are the only traces of 
human hand. What a sight it must have been, when all these 
were perfect! 

A road, level and smooth, running through these tremendous 
rocks, and the blue sky just visible above, the green caper plant and 
wild ivy hanging in festoons over the heads of the travellers as they 
wind along, the flowering oleander fringing then, as now, this 
marvellous highway like the border of a garden-walk. You move on; 
and the ravine, and with it the road,—and with the road in old times 
the caravans of India,—winds as if it were the most flexible of rivers, 
instead of being in truth a rent through a mountain-wall. In this 
respect, in its sinuosity, it differs from any other like gorge I ever 
saw. The peculiarity is, perhaps, occasioned by the singularly 
friable character of the cliffs, the same character that has caused 
the thousand excavations beyond; and the effect is, that instead of 
the uniform character of most ravines, you are constantly turning 
round corners, and catching new lights and new aspects, in which 
to view the cliffs themselves. They are, for the most part, deeply 
red, and when you see their tops emerging from the shade and 
glowing in the sunshine, I could almost forgive the exaggeration 
that calls them scarlet. But in fact they are of the darker hues 
which in the shadow amount almost to black, and such is their 


PENINSULA OF SINAI. 


91 


colour at the point to which I have brought you, after a mile or 
more through the defile—the cliffs over-arching in their narrowest 
contraction—when, suddenly through the narrow opening left be¬ 
tween the two dark walls of another turn of the gorge, you see a 
pale pink front of pillars and sculptured figures closing your view 
from top to bottom. You rush towards it, you find yourself at the 
end of the defile, and in the presence of an excavated temple, which 
remains almost entirely perfect between the two flanks of dark rock 
out of which it is hewn; its preservation, and its peculiarly light and 
rosy tint being alike due to its singular position facing the ravine 
or rather wall of rock, through which the ravine issues, and thus 
sheltered beyond any other building (if one may so call it) from 
the wear and tear of weather, which has effaced, though not 
defaced, the features, and tanned the complexion, of all the other 
temples. 

This I only saw by degrees, coming upon it from the west; but 
to the travellers of old times, and to those who, like Burckhardt in 
modern times, came down the defile, not knowing what they were to 
see, and meeting with this as the first image of the Red City, I 
cannot conceive anything more striking. There is nothing of 
peculiar grace or grandeur in the temple itself—(the Khazne, or 
Treasury, it is called)—it is of the most debased style of Roman 
architecture; but under the circumstances, I almost think one is 
more startled by finding in these wild and impracticable mountains 
a production of the last effort of a decaying and over-refined civilisa¬ 
tion, than if it were something which, by its better and simpler 
taste, mounted more nearly to the source where Art and Nature 
were one. 

Probably any one who entered Petra this way, would be so 
electrified by this apparition (which I cannot doubt to have been 
evoked there purposely, as you would place a fountain or an 
obelisk at the end of an avenue,) as to have no eyes to behold or 
sense to appreciate anything else. Still I must take you to the end. 
The Sik, though it opens here, yet contracts once more, and it is in 
this last stage that those red and purple variegations, which I have 
before described, appear in their most gorgeous hues; and here also 
begins, what must have been properly the Street of Tombs, the Appian 
"Way of Petra. Here they are most numerous, the rock is honey¬ 
combed with cavities of all shapes and sizes, and through these you 
advance till the defile once more opens, and you see—strange and 
unexpected sight!—with tombs above, below, and in front, a Greek 
Theatre (like that of Tusculum) hewn out of the rock, its tiers of seats 
literally red and purple alternately, in the native rock. Once more the 
defile closes with its excavations, and once more opens in the area 
of Petra itself; the torrent-bed passing now through absolute 
desolation and silence, though strewn with the fragments which 







92 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


show that you once entered on a splendid and busy city gathered 
along its rocky banks, as along the quays of some great northern 
river. 

The Sik is unquestionably the great glory of Petra; but there is 
another point, on the other side, which struck me very much also, 
and which, if thoroughly explored, would, I think, be the most 
instructive and interesting spot in the place. 1 You turn up a torrent- 
bed in the western cliffs (for torrent-beds from all sides pour 
down into this area in the heart of the hills), but soon leave it to 
ascend a staircase hewn out of the rocks, steps not absolutely 
continuous now, though probably they once were; broad steps 
glowing with the native colours, which conduct you through 
magnificent rocks, and along the banks of an almost second Sik, 
high up into the vast cluster of rocks which face Mount Hor on the 
north. This staircase is the most striking instance of what you 
see everywhere. Wherever your eyes turn along the excavated 
sides of the rocks you see steps, often leading to nothing; or to 
something which has crumbled away; often with their first steps 
worn away, so that they are now inaccessible; sometimes as 
mere ornaments in the facades, but everywhere seen even more than 
the caves themselves. High up in these rocks, withdrawn like the 
Khazne between two gigantic walls of cliff, with a green platform 
before it, is another temple of the same kind, though not of the 
same singular colour. In fact, it has the appearance of yellow 
stone, but in form it is more perfect than the Khazne, and its 
whole effect is so extremely modern, that I cannot better describe 
its impression on me than by comparing it to a London church of 
the last century. That is to say, you must imagine a London 
church, of the most debased style of ornament and taste, transplanted 
into a mountain nook as wild and solitary as the Splugen. I call it 
solitary—but it was not always so. The Arabic name, El-Deir, 
—“the Convent,”—implies their belief that it was a Christian 
church. Crosses are carved within it. The Sinaitic inscriptions 
are carved on the steps by which it is approached. Ruins lie above, 
below, and around it. Everything, in short, tends to indicate that 
this was a specially sacred spot, and that it was regarded so by 
Christians afterwards. 


KADESH. 

With the departure from Sinai, or at least from Haze- 
roth, the geographical interest of. the Israelite history 
almost ceases till the arrival in the table-lands of Moab, 
and the first beginning of the conquest. Not only is 


1 See p. 97. 


PENINSULA OF SINAI. 


93 


the general course of their march wrapt in great obscurity, 
but even if we knew it, the events are not generally 
of a kind which would receive any special illustration 
from the scenes in which they occurred. 

No attempt shall here be made to track their course in 
detail. It is possible that some future traveller may dis¬ 
cover the stations recorded in the itinerary of the 33rd 
chapter of the Book of Numbers. At present none has 
been ascertained with any likelihood of truth, unless we 
accept the doubtful identification of Hazerotli with Hude - 
rahy 1 of which I have already spoken. All that is clear is 
that they marched northward from Mount Sinai, pro¬ 
bably over the plateau of the Tih—which seems to be 
designated as “ the wilderness of Paran ”—then that they 
descended into the ’Arabah—designated, apparently, as 
“ the wilderness of Zm.” Thence, on the refusal of the 
king of Edom to let them pass through his territory, 
they moved southward, encamped on the shores of the 
Gulf of 'Akaba, at Ezion-Geber, and then turned the 
corner of the Edomite mountains, at their southern 
extremity, and entered the table-lands of Moab at the 
“ torrent of the willows/' (“ the brook Zared ”) at the 
south-east end of the Dead Sea. 

In this general obscurity, one place stands out pro¬ 
minently. There can be no question, that next to Sinai, 
the most important of all the resting-places of the Children 
of Israel is Kadesh. 2 It is the only one dignified by the 
name of “ a city." Its very name awakens our attention 
—the “ Holy Place "—the same name by which Jerusa- 
lem itself is still called in Arabic, “ El-Khods.” It is 


1 A list of possible identifications may¬ 
be seen in the Descriptive Geography of 
Palestine by Rabbi Joseph Schwarze, 
p. 212—214. 

8 Although Reland (Palsestina, p. 115, 
ff.) is probably mistaken in supposing 
that there were two halting - places of 
Israel called Kadesh, yet it does appear 
that in Gen. xvi. 14 ; xx. 1 ; Josh. xv. 
23, another Kadesh may be intended on 
the northern plateau of the Tih ; and, if 
so, this may be the one found by Mr. 
Rowlands (Williams’ Holy City, vol. i. 


App. p. 466,) under the same name, in 
a place corresponding with those indica¬ 
tions, but too far northward and west¬ 
ward to be identified with Kadesh- 
Barnea. The fact of the affix of 
“Barnea” may indicate that there was 
another. Whether Israel was twice at 
Kadesh seems extremely doubtful. The 
difficulty of reducing the second part of 
the wanderings of Israel to distinct 
chronological order, will be evident to 
any one who compares Numb, xxxiii. 30 
—36 with Deut. x. 6—7. 








SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


probably the old oracular “Spring of Judgment/’ mentioned 
as existing in the earliest times of Canaanite history ; 1 as 
if, like Mount Sinai itself, it had an ancient sanctity before 
the host of Israel encamped within its precincts. The 
encampment there is also distinct in character from any 
other in the wilderness, except the stay at Sinai or 
perhaps at Rephidim. The exact time is not given ; but 
it is stated generally that “ they abode in Kadesh many 
days/’ 2 They were there at least forty days, 3 during 
the absence of the spies. In its neighbourhood, two bat¬ 
tles were fought with the southern Canaanites—one a 
defeat, the other a victory. 4 There arose the demand 
for water, which gave to the place its new name of 
Meribah-Kadesh ; 5 there also the rebellion of Korah, and 
the death of the sister and the brother of Moses. 

All these indications compel us to look for some more 
definite locality than can be found in the scattered springs 
and pools in the midst of the Desert, with which travellers 
have usually endeavoured to identify it—such, for exam¬ 
ple, as’Ain El-Weibeh, on the eastern side of the ’Arabah, 
which Dr. Robinson selected as the spot, and which, but for 
the reasons just given, would not be an inappropriate scene. 

The geographical notices of its situation are unfortu¬ 
nately too slight to be of much service. Yet thus much 
they fix, that it was “ in the wilderness of Zin,” 6 that it 
was “ on the ‘ edge ’ of the border of Edom ” 7 —that it was 


1 Gen. xiv. 7. “ ’En-Mishpat (the 

spring of judgment), which is Kadesh.” 
Compare for the combination, Exod. xv. 
25, “He made for them (at Marah) a 
statute and a ‘judgment’ (mishpat).” 
Jerome, however, distinguishes Kadesh- 
’en-Mishpat from Kadesh-Barnea, making 
the former to be a spot in the Valley of 
Gerar, well known in his days as Beer- 
dan,—“ the well of the judge.” De 
Loc. Heb. voc. Puteus judicis. 

2 Deut. i. 46. 

3 Numb. xiii. 25. 

4 Numb. xiv. 45 ; xxi. 1. 

5 Deut. xxxii. 51. 

6 Numb, xxvii. 14; xxxiii. 36; Deut. 

xxxii. 51. In one passage, Kadesh ap¬ 
pears to be placed in ‘ ‘ the wilderness of 
Paran.” Numb. xiii. 26. The spies re¬ 
turned “ unto the wilderness of Paran to 


Kadesh,” (cf. xii. 16.) It is possible 
that the other Kadesh (before noticed) 
may be here meant. But, however it is 
explained, a passage of this kind,—with 
the liability to mistakes which seems to 
have beset the whole text of the wander¬ 
ings,—cannot avail against the emphatic 
contrast elsewhere drawn between the 
two wildernesses of Paran and of Zin, 
and the close connexion of Kadesh-Barnea 
with Zin. 

7 The ‘edge,’ Numb. xx. 16, is the 
same word as is used in Numb, xxxiii. 
37, of Mount Hor. To represent Edom 
as extending west of the ’Arabah in the 
time of Moses is an anachronism, bor¬ 
rowed from the times after the Captivity, 
when the Edomites, driven from their 
ancient seats, occupied the “south” of 
Judaea as far as Hebron ; 1 Macc. v. 65. 


PENINSULA OF SINAI. 


95 




near “ Mount Hor,”—that it was at the southern point to 
which the territory of Judali afterwards reached. 

Is there any place to which these indications correspond? 
Possibly, if the country were thoroughly explored, there 
might be found several in the deserted cities of Edom, 
known only to the very few travellers who have entered 
Edom by the Wady Ithm. At present one only is known, 
and that is Petra. 

An oasis of vegetation in the desert hills ; scenery only 
second in grandeur to that where the Law was delivered ; 
a city of which the present ruins are modern, but of which 
the earlier vestiges reach back to the remotest antiquity 
—these are some of the points which give Petra a claim 
to be considered as the original sanctuary of the Idumean 
wilderness. It is moreover one of the few facts localised 
by anything like an authentic tradition,—in this case 
preserved by Josephus, the Talmudists, Eusebius, 1 and 
Jerome, 2 —that Kadesh was either identical, or.closely 
connected with Petra. With this the existing names 
(though capable of another origin) remarkably harmonise. 
The mountain which overhangs the valley of Petra has 
been known as far back as the knowledge of travellers 
extends, as the “ mountain of Aaron/' The basin of 
Petra is known to the Arabs by no other name than “ the 
Valley of Moses." The great ravine through which the 
torrent is admitted into the valley, is called “ the Cleft of 
Moses "—in distinct reference to the stroke of the rod of 
Moses. 3 


1 Josephus (Ant. IV. iv. 7) speaks of 
Mount Horas lying above Arke, which he 
identifies with Petra. Arke is evidently 
the same word (perhaps with the prefix of 
’Arjfor “mountain”—as in Armageddon) 
as “ Rekem,” the Syriac name for Petra 
(Jerome, De Loc. Heb. voc. Petra and 
Rehem) and the Talmudist name for 
Kadesh,—see also the Syriac and Arabic 
versions,—derived (says Jerome, joc. 
Rehem , and Josephus, Ant. IV. vii. 1) 
from the Midianite chief Rohan. Abulfeda 
(Tabula Syrise, p. 11,) speaks of Ar-Ra- 
kem as near A1 Balka (the Arabic name 
of the country east of the Grhor), and 
remarkable for the houses cut in the 
rock. There may be other places on the 
east of the Grhor to which this description 


would apply, but none to which it would 
so well apply as Petra. The Targums of 
Onkelos, Jonathan, and Jerusalem, call 
Kadesh-Barnea “Rekem Griah,”—‘of the 
ravine,’ probably alluding to the Sik. 
See Schwarze, p. 23, 24, who has, 
however, his own explanations. 

2 “ Cades Bamea in deserto, qum con - 
jungitur civitati Petrce in Arabia.” He 
notices the tomb of Miriam as still shown 
there, not that of Aaron. (De Loc. Heb.) 

3 See p. 90. This also agrees with 

Jerome’s description of Mount Hor. ‘ ‘ Or 

Mons, in quo mortuus est Aaron, juxta 
civitatem Petr am, ubi usque prcesentem 
diem ostenditur rupes qua percussd 
magnas aquas populo dedit. De Loc. 
Heb. voc. Or. 




96 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


In accordance with these confirmations are the inci¬ 
dental expressions of the narrative itself. The word 
always used for “ the rock ” of Kadesh, 1 in describing 
the second supply of water, is “ sela ” or “ cliff” in 
contradistinction to the usual word “ tzfir ”—“ rock ” 
which is no less invariably applied to “ the rock ” 
of Horeb—the scene of the first supply. 2 It may be 
difficult to determine the relative meaning of the two 
words. But it is almost certain that of the two, “sela” 
like our word “ cliff,” is the grander and more abrupt 
feature ; which is of importance as excluding from the 
claimants to the name of Kadesh, such spots as ’Ain El- 
Weibeh, where the rocks are merely stony shelves of 
three or four feet in height. But the name “ Sela ” is also 
the same as that by which in later times the place now 
called “ Petra ” was designated. As the southern boundary 
of Judah is described as reaching over the “ascent of 
scorpions ” to Kadesh, so the Amorite boundary is de¬ 
scribed as “ from the ascent of scorpions, from 4 the cliff ; 
(sela), and upwards.” 3 “ Amaziah took ‘the cliff’ (sela) 
by war.” “ Other ten thousand did the children of Judah 
carry away captive, and brought them up to the top of 
‘ the cliff’ (sela), and cast them down from the top of ‘ the 
cliff ’ (sela), that they were all broken into pieces.” 4 The 
name of Kadesh almost entirely disappears from the 
Sacred Books before the name of Sela appears, and it is 
therefore possible that the latter, taken from its natural 
peculiarity, may have been given to it by the Edomites or 
later settlers, after the recollections of its earlier sanctity 
had passed away. That a sanctuary of this kind should 
have been gradually transformed into an emporium and 
thoroughfare of commerce, as was the case with Petra 
during the Roman empire, would be one out of many 
instances with which oriental and ancient history abounds. 


1 Numb. xx. 8—11. See Appendix. 

■•Exod. xvii. 6. 

3 Joshua xv. 3; Judg. i. 36. 

4 2 Kings xiv. 7 ; 2 Chron. xxv. 12. 
The use of this word in these passages 
makes it probable that the denunciation 
of Psalm cxxxvii. 9, is aimed not against 


the “daughter of Babylon,” but against 
“the children of Edom.”—“Happy 
shall he be that rewardeth thee as 
thou hast served us ; happy shall he be 
that taketh and dasheth thy little ones 
against the ‘cliff’ (sela).” 


PENINSULA OP SINAI. 


If there be any ground for this conclusion, Petra 
assumes a new interest. Its rock-hewn caves may have 
served in part for the dwellings, in part for the graves of 
the Israelites ; it is dignified as the closing scene of the 
life both of Miriam and Aaron ; its sanctity may account 
for the elevation and seclusion of some of its edifices, 
perched high among almost inaccessible rocks, and evi¬ 
dently the resort of ancient pilgrims; its impressive 
scenery well accords with the language of the ancient 
hymns of Israel, in which Kadesh with the surrounding 
rocks of Edom is almost elevated to the rank of a second 
Sinai : “ Lord, when thou wentest out of Seir, when thou 
marchedst out of the field of Edom” 1 —“ God came from 
Teman , and the Holy One from Mount Par an” 2 “ He 

brought them to Mount Sinai and Kadesh-barnea .” 3 “ The 
Lord came from Sinai, and rose up from Mount Seir unto 
them ; he shined forth from Mount Paran, and He came 
. . . , with ten thousands of saints,” 4 (if we take the 
Hebrew as followed in the Authorised Version—but more 
probably with the Septuagint)—“ with the ten thousands 
of Kadesli; ” or (perhaps more probably still, with Ewald, 5 ) 
“ from Meribah-Kadesh .” 

And if any point is to be selected in Petra, as 
especially the seat of this primeval sanctuary, it is that 
which I have just described, commonly known by the 
name of the “ Deir,” or “ Convent.” Its present form 
is of the same modern character as that which deprives 
all these monuments of any deep interest—a fa 9 ade, 
with a vast urn on the summit; the interior, one large 
hall. But its situation and its accompaniments indicate 
the great importance, if not sanctity, with which it was 
invested at some period by the inhabitants of Petra. 
Removed as it is from the sight not only of the town, 
but of the numerous sepulchres or excavations with 
which the cliffs which surround the town are perforated, 
it must have had some special purpose of its own. 
The long ascent by which it is approached, mostly 
along the edge of a precipitous ravine, is carefully 

1 Judg. v. 4. 2 Habak. iii. 3. [ 3 Dent, xxxiii. 2. 

4 Jude 14. 5 Geschichte, 2nd edit., ii. 257. 



98 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


hewn, wherever the rocks admit, into a continuous stair¬ 
case, of which the steps are in more than one instance 
marked by the unknown inscriptions in the so-called 
Sinaitic character. The walls of the interior of the Deir 
itself, as well as the steps, are sculptured with the usual 
accompaniments of these inscriptions,—crosses and figures 
of the wild goat, or ibex. Immediately opposite is a hill, 
with a large chamber below, partly natural, partly artificial; 
containing a sculptured niche at the end of it for a statue ; 
and bases of columns lie strewed around. A staircase 
leads to the roof of the Deir, which is again inscribed with 
a rude character ; and on the rocky platform with which 
the roof communicates, 1 is a circle of hewn stones, and again 
still beyond is a solitary cell hewn in an isolated cliff, and 
joined to this platform by a narrow isthmus of rock. 

In the absolute dearth of records of Petra, it is impos¬ 
sible to decide the reason of the selection of this lonely 
spot for a sanctuary, thus visited, as it would appear, by 
the same pilgrims, who have left their traces so often 
elsewhere in the Peninsula. Yet its situation inevitably 
suggests some relation to Mount Hor. From the threshold, 
indeed, of the Deir, Mount Hor is not visible. 2 But the 
whole of the upper story, and the roof—to which, as I 
have said, a staircase ascends as if for the express purpose 
of commanding a wider view,—both look upon the sacred 
mount of the High Priest’s tomb, and are seen from thence. 
It is in fact the only building of Petra included in the 
view from Mount Hor, through which alone, in its deep 
seclusion, it was first revealed to the eyes of travellers. 

Is it too much to suppose that this point and Mount 
Hor were long regarded as the two sacred spots of Petra ; 
that the scene of the death and sepulture of Aaron was 
designedly fixed in view of this, the innermost sanctuary 
of the Holy Place of “ Kadesh; ” that this sanctity was 
retained through the successive changes of Pagan and 
Christian worship ; and that the pilgrims of the Desert 

1 This last feature I derive from 2 By a not unnatural confusion of an 
Miss Martineau (Eastern Life, 2nd ed., intervening mountain with Mount Hor 
p. 410), who is the only person who has Dr. Robinson (ii. 586) has asserted the 
left a record of its existence. From an contrary. It is one of the very few 
oversight I omitted to see it on the spot. inaccuracies he has committed. 


PENINSULA OF SINAI. 


99 


mounted these time-worn steps, and traced their inscrip¬ 
tions upon the rock, on their way to the only spot, whence 
they could see the grave of Aaron ? 


XVIII.—APPROACH TO PALESTINE. 

The day of leaving Petra was occupied in the passage of the 
mountains into the 'Arabah; the next in crossing the 'Arabah; on 
the other side we came to 'Ain El-Weibeh—three springs with palms 
under the low limestone cliffs which form the boundary of the mass 
of the mountains of the Tih. This spot Dr. Bobinson supposes to 
be Kadesh. 

It was at 'Akaba that Mohammed, stretching out his hands in 
prayer after a few moments of silence, exclaimed, pointing 
over the palm trees, “ There is the new moon,”—the new moon 
which gave me a thrill no new moon had ever wakened before, for, 
if all prospered, its fulness would be that of the Paschal moon 
at Jerusalem. At 'Akaba, too, we first came within the dominions 
of David and Solomon. And now we were already on the 
confines of the tribe of Judah, and the next day we crossed the 
difficult high pass of Safeh, thought to be that through which 
the Israelites were repulsed by the Amorites. 1 Unfortunately a thick 
haze hung over the mountains of Edom, so that we saw them no 
more again. It was on Palm Sunday that we descended on the other 
side, and from this time the approach to Palestine fairly began. How 
the name of Aaron rang with a new sound in the first and second 
lessons of that evening after the sight of Mount Hor. 

The Approach to Palestine — nothing can be more gradual. 
There is no special point at which you can say the Desert is ended and 
the Land of Promise is begun. Yet there is an interest in that solemn 
and peaceful melting away of one into the other which I cannot 
describe. It was like the striking passage in Thalaba describing 
the descent of the mountains, with the successive beginnings of 
vegetation and warmth. The first change was perhaps what one 
would least expect—the disappearance of trees. The last palms 
were those we left at 'Ain el-Weibeh. Palm Sunday was the day 
which shut us out, I believe, with few rare exceptions, from those 
beautiful creations of the Nile and the Desert springs—Judaea 
knows them no more. 2 The next day we saw the last of our 
well-known Acacia—that consecrated and venerable tree of the 
Burning Bush and of the Tabernacle; and then, for the first time 
in the whole journey, we had to take our mid-day meal without 
shade. But meanwhile every other sign of life was astir. On 

1 Numb. xiv. 45 ; xxi. 1 ; Deut. i. 44. regards Palestine generally. See Chapter 

2 This is somewhat overstated as II. viii. 

h 2 




100 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


descending from the Pass of Safely one observed that the little 
shrubs, which had more or less sprinkled the whole 'Arabah, 
were more thickly studded; the next day they gave a gray covering 
to the whole hill-side, and the little tufts of grass threw in a general 
tint of green before unknown. Then the red anemones of Petra 
reappeared, and then here and there patches of corn. As we 
advanced, this thin covering became deeper and fuller; and daisies 
and hyacinths were mixed with the blood-drops 1 of the anemones. 
Signs of ancient habitations appeared in the ruins of forts and 
remains, which might have been either Canaanitish temples or 
Christian churches, on the hill-sides; wells, too, deeply built 
with marble casings round their mouths, worn by the ropes of 
ages. East and west, under a long line of hills which bounded it to 
the north, ran a wide plain in which verdure, though not universal, 
was still predominant. Up this line of hills our Tuesday’s course took 
us, and still the marks of ruins increased on the hill-tops, and long 
courses of venerable rock or stone, the boundaries or roads, or both, 
of ancient inhabitants; and the anemones ran like fire through the 
mountain glens; and deep glades of corn, green and delicious to the 
eye, spread right and left before us. 

Most striking anywhere would have been this protracted approach 
to land after that wide desert sea—these seeds and plants, and planks, 
as it were, drifting to meet us. But how doubly striking, when one 
felt in one's inmost soul, that this was the entrance into the Holy 
Land—“Who is this that cometh from Edom, with dyed garments 
from Bozra ? ” Everything told us that we were approaching the 
sacred frontier. In that solitary ride—for all desert rides are more 
or less solitary—through this peaceful passing away of death into 
life, there was indeed no profanation of the first days of Passion 
Week. That wide plain of which I spoke, with its ruins and walls, 
was the wilderness of Beersheba; with wells such as those for 
which Abraham and Isaac struggled; at which, it may be, 
they had watered their flocks; the neutral ground between the 
Desert and the cultivated region which those shepherd-patriarchs 
would most naturally choose for their wanderings, before the idea 
of a more permanent home had yet dawned upon them. That 
long line of hills was the beginning of “ the hill country of Judaea,” 
and when we began to ascend it, the first answer to our inquiries 
after the route told that it was " Carmel," not the more famous 
mountain of that name, but that on which Nabal fed his flocks; 
and close below its long ranges, was the hill and ruin of “ Ziph;" 
close above, the hill of “ Maon." 2 That is to say, we were now in the 
heart of the wild country where David wandered from Saul like those 


1 It is these which are called “Blood-drops of Christ.” See Chapter II. p. 138. 

2 1 Sam. xxiii. 14, 24; xxv. 2. 


PENINSULA OF SINAI. 


101 


very “partridges in the mountains /’ 1 which we saw abounding in all 
directions. And in the extensive views which the tops of these hills 
commanded on the south, there was the long range of the Tih, 
—faithful to. the last to that same horizontal character which we saw 
from Suez,—and Serbal; and to the east, towering high into the hazy 
sky, what looked like the Alps of Moab ; and between us and them 
a jagged line of lower hills, the rocks of En-gedi; and, in the misty 
depths which parted these nearer and those further mountains, 
there needed no guide to tell that there lay, invisible as yet, the 
Dead Sea. 

Erom these heights, by gradual ascent and descent we went on. 
With Ziph the more desolate region ended. The valleys now 
began, at least in our eyes, almost literally “to laugh and sing.” 
Greener and greener did they grow—the shrubs, too, shot up above 
that stunted growth. At last, on the summits of further hills, lines 
of spreading trees appeared against the sky . 2 Then came ploughed 
fields and oxen. Lastly, a deep and wide recess opened in the hills— 
towers and minarets appeared through the gap, which gradually 
unfolded into the city of “ the Eriend of God ”—this is its Arabic 
name : far up on the right ran a wide and beautiful upland valley, all 
partitioned into gardens and fields, green fig-trees and cherry-trees, 
and the vineyards—famous through all ages; and far off, gray and 
beautiful as those of Tivoli, swept down the western slope the olive- 
groves of Hebron. Most startling of all was the hum through the 
air—hitherto “ that silent air ” which I described during our 
first encampment, but which had grown familiar as the sounds of 
London to those who live constantly within their range—the hum, 
at first, of isolated human voices and the lowing of cattle, rising 
up from these various orchards and corn-fields, and then a sound, 
which, to our ears, seemed like that of a mighty multitude, but 
which was only the united murmur of the population of the little 
town which we now entered at its southern end. They had come 
out to look at some troops which were going off to capture a refrac¬ 
tory chief, and they still remained sitting on the mounds—old men, 
women, and children, in their various dresses, which, after the 
monotonous brown rags of the Bedouins, looked gay and bright— 
sitting, with their hands shading their faces from the rays of the 
afternoon sun, to see the long passage of the caravan, guarded on 
each side by the officers of the Quarantine. High above us, on 
the eastern height of the town—which lies nestled, Italian-like, 
on the slope of a ravine—rose the long black walls and two stately 
minarets of that illustrious mosque, one of the four sanctuaries of 
the Mahometan world, sacred in the eyes of all the world besides, 

1 1 Sam. xxyi. 20. ' birth-place of John the Baptist. See 

2 This was on the hills of Dho- Chapter II. viii, 

rayeh and of “Juta,” the probable 3 El Khalil. 






SINAI AND PALESTINE. 

which covers the Cave of Machpelah, the last resting-place of Abra¬ 
ham, Isaac , 1 and Jacob. We passed on by one of those two ancient 
reservoirs, where King David hanged the murderers of his rival , 3 up 
a slope of green grass, broken only by tombs and flocks of sheep, to 
the high gates of the Quarantine, which closed upon us, and where 
we are now imprisoned for the next three days, but with that glorious 
view of Hebron before us day and night. And now the second stage 
of our tour is finished. 


XIX.-RECOLLECTIONS OF THE FIRST DAY IN PALESTINE. 

Let me say briefly what has chiefly impressed me during that first 
day in Palestine. After all the uncertainty of the Desert topo¬ 
graphy, it was quite startling, though I knew it beforehand, to 
find the localities so absolutely authentic, to hear the names of 
Carmel, Maon, Ziph, shouted out in answer to my questions from 
our . Bedouin guides, and from the ploughmen in the fields, who 
knew no more of David's wanderings than of those of Ulysses. 
And now I am in Hebron, looking on the site of a sepulchre 
whose genuineness has never yet been questioned, and to 
that with equal certainty is to succeed Bethlehem, and to that 
Jerusalem. With this, how much of special localities may be spared 
again and again. Then I am struck with the vast number and 
extent and massiveness of the ruins of the deserted cities, each on 
its mountain height, like those of Italy. I had expected mere 
fragments of stones—I find solid walls, columns, towers. It is 
true they are all ascribed to Christian times. But any way, they give 
a notion of what the country was. 

And I am struck by what is also noticed by Miss Martineau 
—the western, almost the English, character of the scenery. 
Those wild uplands of Carmel and Ziph are hardly distinguishable 
(except by their ruined cities and red anemones) from the Lowlands 
of Scotland or of Wales; these cultivated valleys of Hebron (except 
by their olives) from the general features of a rich valley in York¬ 
shire or Derbyshire. The absence of palms and the presence of 
daisies greatly contributes to this result, and, added to the contrast 
of the strange scenery which has been ours for the last month, gives 
a homelike and restful character to this first entrance which can 
never be effaced. 

Lastly, the great elevation of this country above the level of 
the sea is most forcibly brought out by the journey we have 
made . 3 Prom the moment of leaving the 'Arabali has been 
almost a continual ascent. We mounted the great Pass, of Safeh, 
and, having mounted, hardly descended at all—crossed the great 


1 Gen. xlix. 31. 


2 2 Sam. iv. 12. 


See Chapter II. p. 129. 



PENINSULA OF SINAI. 


table-land of Beersheba—and then mounted the barrier of the 
hills of Judah—and thence have been mounting ever since. Hebron 
is, in fact, only five hundred feet lower than Snowdon. How 
well one understands the expression, “ They went down into Egypt/'’ 


XX.—HEBRON. 

This afternoon (Good Eriday) we walked, under the guard of the 
Quarantine, round the western hills of Hebron. There was little 
to add to the first impressions, except the deep delight of treading 
the rocks and drinking in the view which had been trodden by the 
feet and met the eyes of the Patriarchs and Kings. I observed, too, 
for the first time the enclosures of vineyards with stone walls, and 
towers at the corners for guards. This was the first exemplification 
of the Parables . 1 The hills, except where occupied by vineyards and 
olive-groves, are covered with disjointed rocks and grass, such as 
brought back dim visions of Wales. In that basin which lay 
amongst them, what well-springs of thought spring up; numerous 
as those literal wells and springs with which the whole ground of 
the hills themselves is penetrated. One that most strangely struck 
me, was, that here for the first time was heard that great funeral 
dirge over Abner, whose last echo I had heard in St. Paul's 
Cathedral over the grave of the Duke of Wellington. And mar¬ 
vellous, too, to think that within the massive enclosure of that 
Mosque, lies, possibly, not merely the last dust of Abraham and 
Isaac, but the very body—the mummy—the embalmed bones of 
Jacob, brought in solemn state from Egypt to this (as it then was) 
lonely and beautiful spot. And to the east was the height, the tra¬ 
ditional spot whence Abraham saw the smoke of Sodom rising out 
of the deep gulf between the hills of Engedi and the mountains of 
Moab. 


XXI.-APPROACH TO JERUSALEM. 

In a long line of horses and mules, we quitted Hebron. 

Two more relics of Abraham we saw after leaving the mosque. 
The first was the beautiful and massive oak on its greensward, 
called by his name, and which, with two or three near it, at least 
enables one to figure the scene in Genesis xviii., and to under¬ 
stand why it is that the spot was called “the oaks" (mis¬ 
translated “the plain") of Mamre . 3 Whether this be the exact spot, 
or even the exact kind of tree, seems doubtful; for the next object 
we saw was one of those solid and vast enclosures, now beginning to 
be so familiar; which seems to coincide with the account of the place 

1 See Chapters II. and XIII. 2 Gen. xiii. 18; xviii. 1. See Chapter II. p. 141. 




104 


SINAI AND PALESTINE.. 


which Josephus mentions as the site of what he calls,, not the oak, 
but the terebinth, of Abraham . 1 However, there was the wide 
scenery, the vineyards, too, with their towers, reaching down on 
every side of the valley of Eshcol, whence came the famous cluster; 
and the red anemones, and white roses on their briar-bushes. Next 
in one of those gray and green valleys—for these are the predominant 
colours—appeared, one below the other, the three pools of Solomon— 
I must again say “ venerable,” for I know no other word to describe 
that simple, massive architecture in ruin, yet not in ruin—the “ pools 
of water that he made to water therewith the wood that bringeth forth 
trees,” and there are the very gardens, not now, indeed, beautiful 
as when he came out in state as Josephus describes, with his gold- 
powdered servants , 2 to see them, but marked by the long winding 
defile of Urtas—green, and fresh, and winding as a river—which 
leads towards Jerusalem. And along the mountain side runs the 
water through the channel begun by him, but—strange conjunction 
—restored by Pontius Pilate . 3 

XXII.-FIRST VIEW OF BETHLEHEM. 

Ear away to the east rises the conical hill where Herod died, and 
now we mount the ridge of which that hill is the eastern extremity, 
and crowning the crest of the opposite ridge is a long line of 
houses, with the massive and lofty convent. There was a shout 
which ran down the long file of horsemen, followed by deep silence 
—“Bethlehem.”. 

It is a wild bleak hill, amidst hills equally bleak—if bleak may 
be applied to hills which are terraced with vineyards; in autumn, 
of course, rich and green, and which now in part wave with corn. 
One only green plain, I believe of grass, hangs behind the town. 
But what most arrests the eye is the elevation of the whole 
place, and, above all, that most striking feature, which was to me 
quite unexpected,—the immense wall of the mountains of Moab 
seeming to overhang the lower hills of Judah, from which they are 
only separated by that deep mysterious gulf of the Dead Sea. Well 
might Moses from their summits overlook the Promised Land. 
Well might Orpah return as to a near country—and Naomi be 
reminded of her sorrows. Well might her descendant David choose 
their heights as the refuge for his aged parents when Bethlehem was 
no longer safe for them. 

Of the one great event of Bethlehem you are, of course, reminded 
by the enormous convent—or convents, Latin, Greek, and Armenian 
—clustering round the church, which is divided amongst them in 
different compartments. The original nave of Helena—which is the 

1 Bell. Jud. IV. ix. 7. 

3 See Ritter ; Palastina, p. 276. 


2 Ant. YIII. vii. 3. 



PENINSULA OF SINAI. 


105 


prototype of the Eoman St. Paul's, and of St. Apollinaris of Ravenna 
—and the subterranean church, are alone in common. Whether the 
Cave of the Nativity be genuine or not, yet there is the deep interest 
of knowing that it is the oldest special locality fixed upon by the 
Christian Church. Before the Sepulchre, before the Church of the 
. Ascension, before any of the other countless scenes of our Saviour's 
life had been localised, the famous passage in Justin Martyr proves 
that the cave of Bethlehem was already known and reverenced as the 
scene of the Nativity. And one of the most striking instances of 
this reverence exists in a cave, or rather in one of the many winding 
caves which form the vaults of the church, the cell where Jerome 
lived and died, that he might be near the sacred spot . 1 .... 

I have said one is reminded of the Nativity by the convent. 
But, in truth, I almost think it distracts one from it. Prom the 
first moment that those towers, and hills, and valleys burst upon 
you, there enters the one prevailing thought that now, at last, we are 
indeed in the “ Holy Land." It pervades the whole atmosphere— 
even David and Ruth wax faint in its presence. 


XXIII.—FIRST VIEW OF JERUSALEM. 

Next came Rachel's Tomb—a modern mosque, but the site must 
be the true one—and then, far on the top of the hill opposite 
Bethlehem, was the Convent of St. Elias, seen from Bethlehem, and 
from which I knew we should see Jerusalem. It is the one place 
which commands the view of both. We reached the spot from its 
broken ridge. I saw a wide descent and ascent, and a white line 
rising high—of I knew not what buildings—but I knew that it was 
Jerusalem. . . . What were the main features of the approach? 
Pirst, there was still the mighty wall of Moab ; secondly, there was 
the broad green approach of the valley of Rephaim , 2 so long, so broad, 
so green, that it almost seemed a natural entrance to the city, which 
still remained suspended, as it were, above it—for that white line 
kept increasing in height and length, as we neared it yet saw not 
the deep ravines which parted us from it. The first building 
which catches the eye is the palace of the Armenian Patriarch, 
then the castle, then the minaret over the mosque of David. The 
Mosque of Omar and even the Mount of Olives were for a long time 
shut out by the Hill of Evil Counsel, which, with its solitary tree 3 


1 See Chapter XIV. 

2 I give this broad approach the name 
which is now usually given to it by tra¬ 
vellers. But, in fact, it is hardly a 

“valley,”—being much more what is 
meant by its Arabic name “ El-Beka a, 
—the plain,—the same which is given to 


the plain of Coele-Syria. (Ritter ; Jordan, 
p. 184. See Josh. xi. 17; xii. 7.) And 
there are some reasons for finding the 
“ Valley of Rephaim” further west. See 
Tobler’s Umgebungen, 402. 

3 This is the traditional tree on which 
Judas hanged himself. 





106 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


before us, intercepted all to the east. High beyond towered Eamah 
(of Benjamin). At last the deep descent of the Yalley of Hinnom 
appeared, opening into that of Jehoshaphat. What struck me as 
new and unexpected was the rush, so to speak, of both the valleys 
to the south-west corner of the city. We entered the Jaffa gate 
about 4.30 p.m. 


CHAPTER II. 


PALESTINE. 

Numbers xiii. 17—20. “And Moses sent them to spy out the land of 
Canaan, and said unto them, Get you up this way southward, and go up 
into the mountain : and see the land, what it is; and the people that 
dwelleth therein, whether they be strong or weak, few or many; and 
what the land is that they dwell in, whether it be good or bad; and 
what cities they be that they dwell in, whether in tents, or in strong¬ 
holds ; and what the land is, whether it be fat or lean, whether there be 
wood therein, or not. And be ye of good courage, and bring of the fruit 
of the land.” 

Deut. i. 7. “ Turn you, and take your journey, and go to the mount 

of the Amorites, and unto all the places nigh thereunto, in the ‘ desert,’ 
in the ‘ mountains,’ and in the ‘ low country,' and in the south, and by 
the sea side, to the land of the Canaanites, and unto Lebanon, unto the 
great river, the river Euphrates.” 





MAP OP SYRIA 



•S ‘ 


MAScg> 

* JKV 


r ssm 


\4tiU\f 


De&ert 
of Till 


d*Iior 











PALESTINE. 


General features.—The four Rivers of Syria: the Orontes, the Leon tea, the 
Barada, the Jordan. —General aspect of Palestine.— L Seclusion of Palestine. 
II. Smallness and narrowness of its territory. III. Central situation. IY. 
Land of ruins. V. “Land of milk and honey.” VI. Variety of climate 
and structure. VII. Mountainous character. VIII. Scenery: hills and 
valleys; flowers; trees : cedars, oaks, palms, sycamores. IX. Geological 
features: 1. Springs and wells; 2. Sepulchres; 3. Caves; 4. Natural curi¬ 
osities. X. General conclusion. 

Between the great plains of Assyria and the shores of 
the Mediterranean Sea, a high mountain tract is inter¬ 
posed, reaching from the Bay of Issus to the Desert of 
Arabia. Of this the northern part, which consists of the 
ranges known in ancient geography under the names of 
Amanus and Casius, and which includes rather more than 
half the tract in question, is not within the limits of the Holy 
Land; and, though belonging to the same general 
elevation, is distinguished from the southern division 
by strongly marked peculiarities, and only enters into 
the sacred history at a later time, when its connection 
with any local scenes was too slight to be worth dwelling 
upon in detail. It is with the southern division that 
we are now concerned. 

The range divides itself twice over into two parallel 
chains. There is first, the main chain of Lebanon, sepa¬ 
rated by the broad valley commonly called Coele-Syria ; 
the western mountain reaching its highest termination 
in the northern point of Lebanon ; the eastern, in the 
southern point of Hermon. This last point—itself the 


The 

High Land 
of Syria. 


Lebanon. 






no 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


The Four 
Rivers; 


The 

Orontes, 


The Lit&ny, 


The 

Barada. 


loftiest summit of the whole range—again breaks into 
two ranges, of which the western, with the exception of | 
one broad depression, extends as far as the Desert of Sinai; 
the eastern, as far as the mountains of Arabia Petrsea. 
From this chain, 1 flow four rivers of unequal magnitude, 
on which, at different times, have sprung up the four ruling 
powers of that portion of Asia. Lebanon is, in this respect, 
a likeness of that primeval Paradise, to which its local tra¬ 
ditions have always endeavoured to attach themselves. The 
Northern River, rising from the fork of the two ranges of 
Lebanon and Anti-Lebanon, and forming the channel of 
life and civilisation in that northern division of which we 
have just spoken, is the Orontes,—the river of the G-reek 
kingdom of Antioch and Seleucia. The Western, is the 
Litany, 2 rising from the same watershed between the two 
ranges, near Baalbec, and falling into the Mediterranean, 
close to Tyre,—the river of Phoenicia. The Eastern, 
rising from Anti-Lebanon and joined by one or two 
lesser streams, is the modern Barada, the Abana or 
Pharpar of the Old Testament—the river of the Syrian 
kingdom of Damascus. The kingdoms which have risen 
in the neighbourhood or on the banks of these rivers, 
have flourished not simultaneously, but successively. The 
northern kingdom was the latest, and is only brought 
into connection with the Sacred History, as being that 
from which the “ Kings of the North" made their 
descent upon Palestine, and in which were afterwards 
founded the first Gentile churches. It was, as it were, 
the halting-place of Christianity, before it finally left its 
Asiatic home—beyond the limits of the Holy Land, yet 
not in another country or climate ; naturally resting on 
the banks of the Orontes, on the way from the valley of 
the Jordan, before (to use the Roman poet’s expression in 


1 For the sketch of the Four Rivers, 
see the instructive note on Syria in 
Napoleon’s Memoires, vol. ii., 297, 298. 
The detailed characteristics of each will 
be given in Chapters VII. and XII. 

2 Often in modern geography called 
the Leontes, from a notion that this 
was its ancient name. This notion, as 
Ritter has shown, is doubly mistaken. 
1. The Lit&ny has no ancient name, 


except u the Tyrian river.’* 2. The 
name of Leontes never occurs in ancient 
■writers, and* is a confusion with the 
genitive case of the river Leon (Aeouros 
iroTafiov infioXas), which is the name 
given by Ptolemy (v. 15) to a river 
between Sidon and Bevrout, either the 
Bostrenus (Aulay), or the Tamyras 
(Tamar). See Ritter; Lebanon, p. 122. 


PALESTINE. 


Ill 


another and a better sense) it joined “ the flow of the 
Orontes into the Tiber.” The eastern kingdom of 
Damascus on one side, the western kingdom of Phoenicia 
on the other, claim a nearer connection with the history 
of the chosen people from first to last; the one, as the 
great opening of communication with the distant Eastern 
deserts, the other with the Mediterranean coasts. The 
Fourth and Southern river, which rises in the point 
where Hermon splits into its two parallel ranges, is 
the River of Palestine—The Jordan. 

The Jordan, with its manifold peculiarities, must he re¬ 
served for the time when we come to speak of it in detail. 
Yet it must be remembered throughout, that this river, 
the artery of the whole country, is unique on the surface of 
the globe. The ranges of the Lebanon are remarkable ; 
the courses of the Orontes, the Leontes, and the Barada, 
are curious ; but the deep depression of the Jordan has 
absolutely no parallel. No other valley in the world 
presents such extraordinary physical features, none has 
been the subject of such various theories as to its origin 
and character. How far this strange conformation of the 
Holy Land has had any extensive influence on its history 
may be doubtful. But it is perhaps worth observing at 
the outset, that we are in a country, of which the geo¬ 
graphy and the history each claims to be singular of its 
kind :—the history, by its own records, unconscious, if one 
may so say, of the physical peculiarity; the geography, 
by the discoveries of modern science, wholly without 
regard, perhaps even indifferent or hostile, to the claims 
of the history. Such a coincidence may be accidental; 
but, at least, it serves to awaken the curiosity, and strike 
the imagination; at least, it lends dignity to the country, 
where the Earth and the Man are thus alike objects of 
wonder and investigation. 

It is around and along this deep fissure that the hills of 
western and eastern Palestine spring up, forming the link 
between the high group of Lebanon on the north, and the 
high group of Sinai on the south ; forming the mountain- 
bridge, or isthmus, between the ocean of the Assyrian 
Desert, and the ocean (as it seemed to the ancient world) 


The 

Jordan. 


Palestine. 






112 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


of the Mediterranean, or “ Great Sea ” on the west. On the 
one side of the Jordan these hills present a mass of green 
pastures and forests melting away, on the east, into the red 
plains of the Hauran. On the other side they form a mass 
of gray rock rising above the yellow Desert on the south, 
bounded on the west by the long green strip of the maritime 
plain; cut asunder on the north by the rich plain of 
Esdraelon ; rising again beyond Esdraelon into the wild 
scenery of mountain and forest in the roots of Lebanon. 

Each of these divisions has a name, a character, and, to 
a certain extent, a history of its own, which will best 
appear as we proceed. But there are features more or 
less common to the whole country, especially to that 
portion of it which has been the chief seat of the national 
life; and these, so far as they illustrate the general 
history, must be now considered. “ The Vine ” was 
“ brought out of Egypt : ” what was the land in which 
God “ prepared room before it, and caused it to take deep 
root,” and “ cover the ‘ mountains 9 with its shadow 99 ? 1 


Seclusion 
from the 
rest of the 
ancient 
world. 


I. The peculiar characteristic of the Israelite people, 
whether as contemplated from their own sacred records, 
or as viewed by their Gentile neighbours, was that 
they were a nation secluded, set apart, from the rest 
of the world ; “ haters,” it was said, “ of the human race,” 
and hated by it in return. Is there anything in the 
physical structure and situation of their country which 
agrees with this peculiarity Look at its boundaries. 
The most important in this respect will be that on the 
east. For in that early time, when Palestine first fell to 
the lot of the chosen people, the East was still the world. 
The great empires which rose on the plains of Meso¬ 
potamia, the cities of the Euphrates and the Tigris, were 
literally then, what Babylon is metaphorically in the 
Apocalypse, the rulers and corrupters of all the kingdoms 
of the earth. Between these great empires and the 
people of Israel, two obstacles were interposed. The 
first was the eastern Desert, which formed a barrier 
in front even of the outposts of Israel—the nomadic 


1 Psalm lxxx. 8—10. 


2 See Ritter; Jordan, pp. 1—22. 











































































’ 


* 










































































































4t 





















































































PALESTINE 













































PALESTINE. 


113 


tribes on the east of the Jordan; the second, the vast 
fissure of the Jordan valley, which must always have 
acted as a deep trench within the exterior rampart of 
the Desert and the eastern hills of the Trans-Jordanic 
tribes. 

Next to the Assyrian empire in strength and power, 
superior to it in arts and civilisation, was Egypt. What 
was there on the southern boundary of Palestine, to 
secure that “the Egyptians whom they saw on the 
shores of the Red Sea, they should see no more again % ” 
Up to the very frontier of their own land stretched that 
“great and terrible wilderness,” which rolled like a sea 
between the valley of the Nile and the valley of the Jor¬ 
dan. And this wilderness itself—the platform of the 
Tih—could be only reached on its eastern side by the 
tremendous pass of Akaba at the southern, and of Safeh 1 
at the northern end of the Arabah. On these, the two 
most important frontiers, the separation was most 
complete. 

The two accessible sides were the west and the 
north. But the west was only accessible by sea, and 
when Israel first settled in Palestine, the Mediterranean 
was not yet the thoroughfare — it was rather the 
boundary and the terror of the eastern nations. It is 
true that from the north-western coast of Syria, the 
Phoenician cities sent forth their fleets. But they were the 
exception of the world, the discoverers, the first explorers of 
the unknown depths,—and in their enterprises Israel never 
joined. In strong contrast, too, with the coasts of Europe, 
and especially of Greece, Palestine has no indentations, no 
winding creeks, no deep havens, such as in ancient, even 
more than in modern times, were necessary for the invitation 
and protection of commercial enterprise. One long line, 
broken only by the bay of Acre, containing only three bad 
harbours, J oppa, Acre, and Caipha—and the last unknown 
in ancient times—is the inhospitable front that Palestine 
opposed to the western world. On the northern frontier 
the ranges of Lebanon formed two not insignificant 
ramparts. But the gate between them was open, and 

1 See Chapter I. Part ii. pp. 84, 99. 



114 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


Smallness 
and nar¬ 
rowness of 
territory. 


through the long valley of Coele-Syria, the hosts of Syrian 
and Assyrian conquerors accordingly poured. These 
were the natural fortifications of that vineyard which 
was “ hedged round about” with tower and trench, sea 
and desert, against the “ boars of the wood,” and “ the 
beast of the field.” 

II. In Palestine, as in Greece, every traveller is struck 
with the smallness of the territory. He is surprised, even 
after all that he has heard, at passing, in one long day, 
from the capital of Judaea to that of Samaria ; or at 
seeing, within eight hours, three such spots, as Hebron, 
Bethlehem, and Jerusalem. The breadth of the country 
from the Jordan to the sea is rarely more than fifty 
miles. Its length from Dan to Beersheba is about a 
hundred and eighty miles. The time is now gone by, 
when the grandeur of a country is measured by its size, 
or the diminutive extent of an illustrious people can 
otherwise than enhance the magnitude of what they have 
done. The ancient taunt, however, and the facts which 
suggested it, may still illustrate the feeling which appears 
in their own records. The contrast between the littleness 
of Palestine and the vast extent of the empires which 
hung upon its northern and southern skirts, is rarely 
absent from the mind of the Prophets and Psalmists. 
It helps them to exalt their sense of the favour of God 
towards their land by magnifying their little hills and 
dry torrent-beds into an equality with the giant hills of 
Lebanon and Hermon and the sea-like rivers of Meso¬ 
potamia. 1 It also fosters the consciousness, that they 
were not always to be restrained within these earthly 
barriers—“ The place is too strait for me ; give me place 
where I may dwell.” Nor is it only the smallness but the 
narrowness of the territory which is remarkable. From 
almost every high point in the country, its whole breadth 
is visible, from the long wall of the Moab hills on the east, 
to the Mediterranean sea on the west. Whatever may 

1 Compare Ps. lxviii. 15; — “The lished on the top of the mountains.” 
‘Mount’of God is a high ‘mountain,’ Ps. xlvi. 4;—“There is a river, the 
as the ‘mountain’ of Bashan” (i. €., of streams whereof shall make glad the 
Anti-Libanus). Isa. ii. 2;—“The moun- city of God.” 
tain of the Lord’s house shall be estab- 


PALESTINE. 


115 


be the poverty or insignificance of the landscape, it 
is at once relieved by a glimpse of either of these two 
boundaries. 


*■ Two voices are there—one is of the sea, 

One of the mountains,”— 

and the close proximity of each—the deep purple shade 
of the one, and the glittering waters of the other— 
makes it always possible for one or other of those two 
voices to be heard now, as they were by the Psalmists of 
old. “ The strength of the ‘ mountains 9 is his also—The 
sea is his, and He made it.” 1 

Thus, although the Israelites were shut off by the 
southern and eastern deserts from the surrounding nations, 
they yet were always able to look beyond themselves. 
They had no connection with either the eastern empires 
or the western isles—but they could not forget them. As 
in the words and forms of their worship they were con¬ 
stantly reminded how they had once been strangers in 
the land of Egypt; so the sight of the hills beyond the 
Jordan, and of the sea beyond the Philistine plain, 
were in their daily life a memorial that they were 
there secluded not for their own sakes, but for the sake 
of the world in whose centre they were set. The 
mountains of Gilead, and on the south, the long ridges of 
Arabia, were at hand to remind them of those distant 
regions from which their first fathers Abraham and 
Jacob had wandered into the country,—from which “ the 
camels and dromedaries of Midian and Ephah ” were once 
again to pour in. The sea, whitening then as now with 
the ships of Tarshish, the outline of Chittim or Cyprus 2 
just visible in the clear evening horizon, must have told 
them of the western world where lay the “ isles of the 
Gentiles,” which “ should come to their light, and kings to 

the brightness of their rising.Who are these that fly as 

a cloud, and as the doves to their windows \ Surely the 
isles shall wait for me, and the ships of Tarshish first.” 3 The 

1 Ps. xcv. 4, 5. 

See Chapter XII. 3 Isa. lx. 3, 8, 9. 

i 2 





116 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


Central 

Situation. 


very name of the “ west ” was to them “ the sea ; ” 1 and 
it is not merely a poetic image, but a natural reflex 
of their whole history and situation, that the great revela¬ 
tion of the expansion of the Jewish system to meet the 
wants of all nations should have been made to the Apostle 
on the house-top at Jaffa— 

“ When o’er the glowing western main 
His wistful brow was upward raised ; 

Where, like an Angel’s train, 

The burnished water blazed.” 2 

III. This leads us to another point of view, in which the 
situation of Palestine is remarkably hound up with its 
future destinies. “ I have set Jerusalem in the midst of 
the nations and countries that are round about her/’ 
In later times this passage was taken in the literal sense 
that Palestine, and Jerusalem especially, was actually the 
centre of the earth 3 —a belief of which the memorial is 
yet preserved in the large round stone still kissed 
devoutly by Greek pilgrims, in their portion of the 
Church of the Holy Sepulchre . 4 It is one of the many 
instances in which the innocent fancy of an earlier faith 
has been set aside by the discoveries of later science. In 
the East probably there are still many points of this kind 
which have been long surrendered in the more stirring 
West. But there was a real truth in it at the time that 
the Prophet wrote, which the subsequent course of 
history makes it now difficult for us to realise. Palestine, 
though now at the very outskirts of that tide of civilisation 
which has swept far into the remotest West, was then the 
vanguard of the eastern, and therefore, of the civilised 
world ; and, moreover, stood midway between the two 
great seats of ancient Empire, Babylon and Egypt. It 
was on the high road from one to the other of these 
mighty powers, the prize for which they contended, the 


1 The Hebrew “Jam,” is both “the 
sea” and “ the west.” 

2 Christian Year. Monday in Easter 
week. See Chapter VI. 

3 Ezek. v. 5. See the quota¬ 

tions from Jerome, Theodoret, and 


Kimchi, in Reland’s Palestine, cap. x. 
p. 52. 

4 The same belief is seen in the old 
mediaeval maps of the world—such as 
that, of the 14th century, preserved in 
Hereford Cathedral. 


PALESTINE. 


117 


battlefield on which they fought—the high bridge, 1 
over which they ascended and descended respectively 
into the deep basins of the Nile and Euphrates. Its first 
appearance on the stage of history is as a halting-place 
for a wanderer from Mesopotamia, 2 who “ passed through 
the land,” and “journeyed going on still toward the 
south,” and “went down into Egypt.” The first great 
struggle which that wanderer had to maintain, was against 
the host of Chedorlaomer, from Persia and from Babylon. 
The battle in which the latest hero of the Jewish 
monarchy perished, was to check the advance of an 
Egyptian king on his way to contest the empire of the 
then known world with the king of Assyria at Carchemish. 3 
The whole history of Palestine, between the return from 
the Captivity and the Christian sera, is a contest between 
the “ kings of the north and the kings of the south ” 4 
—the descendants of Seleucus and the descendants of 
Ptolemy,—for the possession of the country. And when 
at last the West begins to rise as a new power on the 
horizon, Palestine as the nearest point of contact between 
the two worlds, becomes the scene of the chief conflicts of 
Rome with Asia. 5 There is no other country in the world 
which could exhibit the same confluence of associations, 
as that which is awakened by the rocks which overhang 
the crystal stream of the Dog River, 6 where it rushes 
through the ravines of Lebanon into the Mediterranean 
Sea ; where side by side are to be seen the hieroglyphics 
of the great Rameses, the cuneiform characters of 
Sennacherib, and the Latin inscriptions of the Emperor 
Antoninus. 7 

IY. This is the most convenient place for noticing a pecu¬ 
liarity of the present aspect of Palestine, which though not, 
properly speaking, a physical feature, is so closely con¬ 
nected both with its outward imagery and with its general 

1 See Ritter’s interesting Lecture nately to the conquerors from the East 

on the Jordan and the Dead Sea, and from the West, is well put in 
Berlin, 1850, p. 8. Salvador’s Domination Romaine , vol. i. 

2 Genesis xii. 6, 9, 10. P- 53. 

3 2 Kings xxiii. 29. 2 Chron. xxxv. 6 The NAhr-el-Kelb, just above 

20_24. Beyrout. See Chapter VI. 

4 p) an> x j # 6, ff. 7 See Ritter, Lebanon, pp. 531—546. 

5 This resistance of Palestine alter- 


Land *of 
Ruins. 










118 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


situation, that it cannot be omitted. Above all other 
countries in the world, it is a Land of Ruins. It is not 
that the particular ruins are on a scale equal to those of 
Greece or Italy, still less to those of Egypt. But there is no 
country in which they are so numerous, none in which they 
bear so large a proportion to the villages and towns still 
in existence. In Judaea it is hardly an exaggeration to 
say that whilst for miles and miles there is no appearance 
of present life or habitation, except the occasional goat¬ 
herd on the hill side, or gathering of women at the wells, 
there is yet hardly a hill-top of the many within sight 
which is not covered by the vestiges of some fortress or city 
of former ages. Sometimes they are fragments of ancient 
walls, sometimes mere foundations and piles of stone, but 
always enough to indicate signs of human habitation and 
civilisation. Such is the case in Western Palestine. In 
Eastern Palestine, and still more if we include the Hauran 
and the Lebanon, the same picture is continued, although 
under a somewhat different aspect. Here the ancient 
cities remain, in like manner deserted, ruined, but standing; 
not mere masses and heaps of stone, but towns and 
houses, in amount and in a state of preservation which 
have no parallel except in the cities of Herculaneum 
and Pompeii, buried under the eruption of Vesuvius. 
Not even in Rome or Athens, hardly in Egyptian 
Thebes, can ancient buildings be found in such magni¬ 
tude and such profusion as at Baalbec, Jerash, and 
Palmyra. No where else, it is said, can all the details of 
Roman domestic architecture be seen so clearly as in the 
hundreds of deserted villages which stand on the red desert 
of the Haur&n. This difference between the ruins of the two 
regions of Palestine arises no doubt from the circumstance, 
that whereas Eastern Syria has been for the last four 
hundred years entirely, for the last fifteen hundred years 
nearly, deserted by civilised, almost by barbarian, man, 
Western Palestine has always been the resort of a popula¬ 
tion which, however rude and scanty, has been sufficiently 
numerous and energetic to destroy and to appropriate 
edifices which in the less frequented parts beyond the 
Jordan have escaped through neglect and isolation. 


PALESTINE. 


119 


But the general fact of the ruins of Palestine, whether 
erect or fallen, remains common to the whole country ; 
deepens and confirms, if it does not create, the impression 
of age and decay, which belongs to almost every 
view of Palestine, and invests it with an appearance 
which can be called by no other name than venerable . 
Moreover, it carries us deep into the historical pecu¬ 
liarities of the country. The ruins we now see are of 
the most diverse ages ; Saracenic, Crusading, Roman, 
Grecian, Jewish, extending perhaps even to the old 
Canaanitish remains, before the arrival of Joshua. This 
variety, this accumulation of destruction, is the natural 
result of the position which has made Palestine for so 
many ages the thoroughfare and prize of the world. 
And although we now see this aspect brought out in a 
fuller light than ever before, yet as far back as the 
history and language of Palestine reaches, it was fami¬ 
liar to the inhabitants of the country. In the rich local 
vocabulary of the Hebrew language, the words for sites 
of ruined cities occupy a remarkable place. Four sepa¬ 
rate designations are used for the several stages of decay 
or of destruction, which were to be seen even during 
the first vigour of the Israelite conquest and monarchy. 
There was the rude “ cairn,” or pile of stones, roughly rolled 
together. 1 There was the mound or heap of ruin, 2 which, 
like the Monte Testaccio. at Rome, was composed of the 
rubbish and debris of a fallen city. There were the 
forsaken villages, 3 such as those in the Hauran, when 
“ the cities were wasted without inhabitant and the houses 
without man,”—“forsaken, and not a man to dwell 
therein.” There are lastly true ruins, such as those 
to which we give the name—buildings standing, yet 
shattered, like those of Baalbec or Palmyra. 4 

1 Gal, u rolling.” Such were the 
cairns over Achan and the King of Ai; 

Joshua, vii. 26; viii. 29. 

2 Tel, “heap.” Such were the cities so- 

called in the neighbourhood of Ba¬ 
bylon :—Tel-abib (Ezek. iii. 15), Tel- 
liarsa, or haresha (Ezr. ii. 59. Neh. vii. 

61), Tel-melah (do. do.), Telassar (Isa. 
xxxvii. 12). The word has thence passed 


into Arabic as the common name for a 
“ hill,”—in which sense it seems to be 
used in Joshua, xi. 13, “the cities 
that stood still on their * heaps * 
(telim).” 

3 Azubah, “forsaken.” Isa. vi. 12; 
xvii, 2,9 ; lxii. 12. Jer. iv. 29. Zeph. ii. 4. 

4 Ai. Three towns at least were so 
called from this circumstance. 1. Ai, 


120 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


“The land 
of milk and 
honey.” 


What, therefore, we now see, must to a certain extent 
have been seen always—a country strewed with the relics 
of an earlier civilisation ; a country exhibiting even in the 
first dawn of history the theatre of successive conquests 
and destructions—“giants dwelling therein of old time 
.... a people great, and many, and tall, .... but the 
Lord destroyed them before those that came after ; and 
they succeeded them and dwelt in their stead /' 1 

Y. But this aspect of the land, whilst it reminds us in 
some respects of the identity of its present appearance 
with that of the past, reminds us still more forcibly of its 
difference. 

The countless ruins of Palestine, of whatever date they 
may be, tell us at a glance that we must not judge the 
resources of the ancient land by its present depressed 
and desolate state. They show us not only that “ Syria 
might support tenfold its present population, and bring forth 
tenfold its present produce /' 2 but that it actually did so. 
And this brings us to the question which Eastern travellers 
so often ask, and are asked on their return, “ Can these 
stony hills, these deserted valleys, be indeed the Land of 
Promise, the land flowing with milk and honey \ " 

There are two answers to this question. First, as 
has just been observed, the country must have been very 
different when every hill was crowned with a flourishing 
town or village, from what it is since it ceased to be the 
seat not only of civilisation, but in many instances even of 
the population and habitations which once fertilised it. 


Josh. vii. (compare viii. 28); 2. Ije- 
abarim, or Iim, ‘ in the border of 
Moab ; ’ (Numb, xxxiii. 44 ; and 3. Iim, 
in the south of Judah (Josh. xv. 29). 
The “Avites,” or Avim, the earliest 
inhabitants of Philistia (Deut. ii. 23), 
seem to have derived their name from 
this word—“The dwellers in ruins.” To 
what an antiquity does this carry us 
back. Ruins before the days of those 
who preceded the Philistines ! 

1 Deut. ii. 10,12, 20, 21, 22, 23. 

2 Report of Mr. Moore, Consul-Gene¬ 
ral of Syria, appended to Dr. Bowring’s 
Report on the Commercial Statistics of 
Syria, presented to both Houses of Par¬ 


liament. (London, 1840.) Pp. 90—111. 
It is needless to adduce proofs of a 
fact so well attested, both by existing 
vestiges, and by universal testimony, 
as the populousness of Syria, not only 
in the times of the Jewish monarchy, 
but of the Greek kingdom, the Roman 
empire, and the middle ages. But 
any one who wishes to see the argu¬ 
ment drawn out in detail, will find it in 
the 3rd, 4th, and 5th chapters of Keith’s 
Land of Israel,—a book disfigured 
indeed by an extravagant and unten¬ 
able theory, but containing much useful 
information. 


PALESTINE. 


“ The entire destruction of the woods which once covered 
the mountains, and the utter neglect of the terraces which 
supported the soil on steep declivities, have given full 
scope to the rains, which have left many tracts of bare rock, 
where formerly were vineyards and cornfields.” 1 It is 
probable too that, as in Europe generally, since the dis¬ 
appearance of the German forests, and in Greece, since 
the fall of the plane-trees which once shaded the bare 
landscape of Attica, the gradual cessation of rain pro¬ 
duced by this loss of vegetation has exposed the country 
in a greater degree than in early times to the evils of 
drought. This at least is the effect of the testimony of 
residents at Jerusalem, within whose experience the 
Kedron has recently for the first time flowed with a 
copious torrent, evidently in consequence of the numerous 
enclosures of mulberry and olive groves, made within the 
last few years by the Greek convent, and in themselves 
a sample of the different aspect which such cultivation 
more widely extended would give to the whole country. 
The forest of Hareth, and the thicket-wood of Ziph, in 
Judaea; 2 the forest of Bethel ; 3 the forest of Sharon ; 4 
the forests which gave their name to Kirjath-jearim, “the 
city of forests/' 5 have long disappeared. Palm-trees, 
which are now all but unknown on the hills of Palestine, 
formerly grew, as we shall presently see, with myrtles 
and pines, on the now almost barren slopes of Olivet; 
and groves of oak and terebinth, though never frequent, 
must have been certainly more common than at present. 
The very labour which was expended on these barren 
hills of Palestine in former times, has increased their 
present sterility. The natural vegetation has been swept 
away, and no human cultivation now occupies the terraces 
which once took the place of forests and pastures. 6 

Secondly, even without such an effort of imagination 
as is required to conceive an altered state of population 


1 Dr. Olin’s Travels in the East, vol. 
ii. 428. The whole passage is worth 
perusal, as a calm and clear statement 
of a somewhat entangled and delicate 
question. 

2 1 Sam. xxii. 5 ; xxiii. 15. 


3 2 Kings ii. 24 ; 1 Sam. xiv. 25. 

4 See Chap. VI. ii. 

5 Compare 1 Sam. vi. 21, vii. 1. and 
1 Chron. xiii. 5, with Ps. cxxxii. 6. 

6 This is well put in Keith’s Land of 
Israel, p. 425. 


m 

Destruction, 
of wood. 


Contrast 
with the 
Desert ; . 


122 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


■with As¬ 
syria ; 


and with 
Egypt. 


and civilisation, it is enough to remember the actual 
situation of Palestine, in its relation to the surrounding 
countries of the East. We do not sufficiently bear in 
mind that the East, that is the country between the Medi¬ 
terranean and the table-lands of Persia, between the Sahara 
and the Persian gulf, is a waterless desert, only diver¬ 
sified here and there by strips and patches of vegetation . 1 
Such green spots or tracts,—which are in fact but oases 
on a large scale,—are the rich plains on the banks of the 
Tigris and the Euphrates, the long strips of verdure on the 
banks of the Nile, the occasional centres of vegetation in 
Arabia Felix and Idumaea; and, lastly, the cultivated 
though narrow territory of Palestine itself. It is true that 
as compared with the depth of soil and richness of 
vegetation on the banks of the Nile, or with the carpet of 
flowers described 2 on the banks of the Chebar, Palestine 
seems poor and bare. But as compared with the wdiole 
surrounding country in the midst of which it stands, 
it is unquestionably a fertile land in the midst of barren¬ 
ness. The impression on entering it from the south has 
been already described . 3 The Desert often encroaches 
upon it—the hills of Anti-Libanus which overhang the 
plain of Damascus, and those which bound Judaea on 
the east, are as truly parts of the wilderness as Sinai 
itself. But the interior of the country is never entirely 
destitute of the signs of life, and the long tracts of 
Esdraelon, and the sea-coast and the plain of Genne- 
sareth, are, or might be, as rich with gardens and with 
cornfields as the most favoured spots in Egypt. And 
there is, moreover, this peculiarity which distinguishes 
Palestine from the only countries with which it could then 
be brought into comparison. Chaldsea and Egypt—the 
latter of course in an eminent degree—depend on the 
course of single rivers. Without the Nile, and the utmost 
use of the waters of the Nile, Egypt would be a desert. 

1 The Emperor Napoleon, in his re- of civilised power reared within their 
marks on the short-lived character of reach. (Memoires. Eng. Tran. vol. 
Asiatic dynasties, ascribes it to the fact ii. 265.) 

that Asia is surrounded by deserts, 2 Layard’s Nineveh and Babylon, pp. 

which furnish a never-ceasing supply of 269, 273, 308. 

barbarian hordes to overthrow the seats 3 See Chapter I. Part ii. p. 100. 


PALESTINE. 


123 


But Palestine is well distinguished not merely as “ a land 
of wheat and barley, and vines, and fig-trees, and pome¬ 
granates, of oil-olive and honeybut emphatically as “ a 
good land, a land of brooks of water, of fountains and 
depths that spring out of ‘ plains ’ and ‘ mountains *”— 
“ not as the land of Egypt, where thou sowedst thy seed 
and wateredst it with thy foot, as a garden of herbs : but 
as a land of ‘ mountains J and ‘ plains/ which drinketh water 
of the rain of heaven.” 1 This mountainous character—this 
abundance of water both from natural springs and from 
the clouds of heaven, in contradistinction to the one 
uniform supply of the great river ; this abundance of 
“ milk ” from its “ cattle on a thousand hills,” of “ honey ” 
from its forests and its thymy shrubs, was absolutely 
peculiar to Palestine amongst the civilised nations of the 
East. Feeble as its brooks might be,—though, doubtless, 
they were then more frequently filled than now—yet still 
it was the only country where an Eastern could have been 
familiar with the image of the Psalmist: “ He sendeth 
the springs into- the valleys, which run among the 
c mountains/ ” 2 Those springs too, however short-lived, 
are remarkable for their copiousness and beauty. Hot only 
not in the East, but hardly in the West, can any fountains 
and sources of streams be seen so clear, so full-grown even 
at their birth, as those which fall into the Jordan and its 
lakes through its whole course from north to south. 
Wales or Westmoreland are, doubtless, not regarded as 
fertile regions; and the green fields of England, to 
those who have come fresh from Palestine, seem, by 
way of contrast, to be indeed “ a land of promise.” But 
transplant Wales or Westmoreland into the heart of 
the Desert, and they would be far more to the inhabitant 
of the Desert than to their inhabitants are the richest 
spots of England. Far more : both because the contrast 
is in itself greater, and because the phenomena of a 
mountain country, with wells and springs, are of a kind 
almost unknown to the dwellers in the deserts or river- 
plains of the East. 

Palestine therefore, not merely by its situation, but by 


1 Dent. viii. 7, 8; xi. 10, 11. 


2 Ps. civ. 10. 





124 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


Variety of 
structure 
and climate. 


its comparative fertility, might well be considered the prize 
of the Eastern world, the possession of which was the 
mark of God’s peculiar favour ; the spot for which the 
nations would contend : as on a smaller scale the Bedouin 
tribes for some “diamond of the desert”—some “palm- 
grove islanded amid the waste.” And a land of which the 
blessings were so evidently the gift of God, not, as in 
Egypt , 1 of man’s labour, which also, by reason of its 
narrow extent, was so constantly within reach and sight 
of the neighbouring Desert, was eminently calculated to 
raise the thoughts of the nation to the Supreme Giver of 
all these blessings, and to bind it by the dearest ties to the 
land which He had so manifestly favoured . 2 

VI. What has been already said is enough to indicate 
the extraordinary variety of structure and temperature 
exhibited in the Holy Land. It is said by Volney , 3 
and apparently with justice, that there is no district on 
the face of the earth which contains so many and such 
sudden transitions. Such a country furnished at once 
the natural theatre of a history and a literature, which 
was destined to spread into nations accustomed to the 
most various climates and imagery. There must of 
course, under any circumstances, be much in the history 
of any nation, eastern or western, northern or southern, 
which, to other quarters of the world, will be more 
or less unintelligible. Still it is easy to conceive that 
whatever difficulty is presented to European or American 
minds by the sacred writings, might have been greatly 
aggravated had the Bible come into existence in a country 
more limited in its outward imagery than is the case with 
Palestine. If the Valley of the Nile or the Arabian Desert 
had witnessed the whole of the sacred history, it is 
impossible not to feel how widely separated it would 
have been from the ordinary European mind ; how small 
a portion of our feelings and imaginations would have 

1 Compare the remarks of the Empe- no influence there. But in Egypt, 
ror Napoleon on Egypt. Memoires, vol. where the irrigations can only be arti- 
ii. 211. (Eng. Tran.) “The plains of ficial, government is everything.” 
Beaune and Brie in Champagne are fe- 2 See Ewald, Geschichte, 2nd Edit, 
cundated by regular waterings from the vol. i. p. 296. 
rains. Government has, in this respect, 3 See Bitter ; Jordan, p. 350. 


PALESTINE. 


125 


been represented by it. The truths might have been 
the same, but the forms in which they were clothed 
would have affected only a few here and there, leaving 
the great mass untouched. But as it is, we have the 
life of a Bedouin tribe, of an agricultural people, of 
seafaring cities; the extremes of barbarism and of 
civilisation; the aspects of plain and of mountain ; of a 
tropical, of an eastern, and almost of a northern climate. 
In Egypt there is a continual contact of desert and culti¬ 
vated land; in Greece, there is a constant intermixture of 
the views of sea and land ; in the ascent and descent of the 
great mountains of South America there is an interchange 
of the torrid and the arctic zones ; in England, there is an 
alternation of wild hills and valleys with rich fields and 
plains. But in Palestine all these are combined. The 
Patriarchs could here gradually exchange the nomadic 
life for the pastoral, and then for the agricultural, passing 
almost insensibly from one to the other as the Desert melts 
imperceptibly into the hills of Palestine. Ishmael and Esau 
could again wander back into the sandy waste which lay 
at their very doors . 1 The scape-goat could still be sent 
from the temple-courts into the uninhabited wilderness . 2 
John, and a greater than John, could return in a day’s 
journey from the busiest haunts of men into the soli¬ 
tudes beyond the Jordan . 3 The various tribes could 
find their several occupations of shepherds, of warriors, 
of traffickers, according as they were settled on the 
margin of the Desert, in the mountain fastnesses, or 
on the shore of the Mediterranean. The sacred poetry, 
which was to be the delight and support of the human 
mind and the human soul in all regions of the world, 
embraced within its range the natural features of almost 
every country. The venerable poet of our own moun¬ 
tain regions used to dwell with genuine emotion on 
the pleasure he felt in the reflection that the Psalmists 
and Prophets dwelt in a mountainous country, and 
enjoyed its beauty as truly as himself. The devotions 
of our great maritime empire find a natural expression 

1 See Chapter J. Part ii. p. 100. 

3 See Chapters X. and XIII. 


2 Lev. xvi. 22. 


126 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


in the numerous allusions, which no inland situation 
could have permitted, to the roar of the Mediterranean 
sea, breaking over the rocks of Acre and Tyre,—“ the 
floods lift up their voice, the floods lift up their waves,” 
—the “ great and wide sea,” whose blue waters could 
be seen from the top of almost every mountain, “ wherein 
are things creeping innumerable.” There go the Phoe¬ 
nician “ships” with their white sails, and “there is 
that Leviathan,” the monster of the deep, which both 
Jewish and Grecian fancy was wont to place in the inland 
ocean, which was to them all, and more than all, that the 
Atlantic is to us. Thither “they went down ” from their 
mountains, and “did their business in ships,” in the “ great 
waters,” and saw the “ wonders ” of the “ deep ” ; and 
along those shores were the “ havens,” few and far between, 
“where they would be” when “the storm became calm, and 
the waves thereof were still .” 1 And with these milder, and to 
us more familiar images, were blended the more terrible, as 
well as the more beautiful forms, of tropical and eastern life. 
There was the earthquake and possibly the volcano. “ He 
looketh on the earth and it trembleth—He toucheth the 
mountains and they smoke.” 2 “ The mountains shall be 

molten under Him, and the valleys shall be cleft as wax 
before the fire, and as the waters that are poured down a 
steep place.” 3 There was the hurricane, with its thick dark¬ 
ness, and the long continuous roll of the oriental thunder¬ 
storm. “ He bowed the Heavens and came down, and 
there was darkness under His feet. ... He rode upon 
the wings of the wind. . . . The Lord thundered out of 
heaven, and the Highest gave His voice, hailstones and 
coals of fire. . . . The voice of the Lord divideth the flames 
of fire .” 4 Hermon, with his snowy summit always in 
sight, furnished the images which else could hardly have 
been looked for,—“ snow and vapours,”—“ snow like wool,” 
“hoar-frost like ashes”—“ice like morsels .” 5 From the jun¬ 
gle of the Jordan valley and the wild mountains of Judah, 
came the “lions roaring after their prey .” 6 And then 

1 Ps. civ. 26 ; cvii. 23—30. 5 Ps. cxlvii. 16 ; cxlviii. 8. 

2 Ps. civ. 32. 3 Micah, i. 4. fi Ps. civ. 21; Jer. xlix. 19; 1 Sam. 

4 Ps. xviii. 9; x.\ix. 7. xvii. 34. 


PALESTINE. 


127 


again, the upland hills experienced all the usual alternations 
of the seasons ; the “ rain descending on the mown grass,” 
the “ early and the latter rain,” the mountains “ watered 
from His chambers, the earth satisfied with the fruit of 
His works ; ” 1 which, though not the same as the ordinary 
returns of a European climate, were yet far more like it 
than could be found in Egypt, Arabia, or Assyria. 

Such instances of the variety of Jewish experience in 
Palestine, as contrasted with that of any other country, 
might easily be multiplied. But enough has been said to 
show its fitness for the history or the poetry of a nation 
with a universal destiny, and to indicate one at least of 
the methods by which that destiny was fostered ; the 
sudden contrasts of the various aspects of life and death, 
sea and land, verdure and desert, storm and calm, heat 
and cold, which, so far as any natural means could assist, 
cultivated what has been well called the “ variety in unity,” 
so characteristic of the sacred books of Israel; so unlike 
those of India, of Persia, of Egypt, of Arabia. 

VII. Amidst this great diversity of physical features, 
undoubtedly the one which most prevails over the others 
is its mountainous character. As a general rule, Palestine 
is not merely a mountainous country, but a mass of 
mountains, rising from a level sea-coast on the west, and 
from a level desert on the east, only cut asunder by the 
valley of the Jordan from north to south, and by the 
valley of Jezreel from east to west. The result of this 
peculiarity is, that not merely the hill-tops, but 
the valleys and plains of the interior of Palestine, both 
east and west, are themselves so high above the level of 
the sea, as to partake of all the main characteristics of 
mountainous history and scenery. Jerusalem is of nearly 
the same elevation as Skiddaw, and most of the chief cities 
of Palestine are several hundred feet above the Mediter¬ 
ranean Sea. 

I. Many expressions of the Old and Hew Testaments 
have immediate reference to this configuration of the 
country, the more remarkable from its contrast with the 


Palestine, a 

mountain- 

country. 


‘ ‘ Aram.” 


1 Ps. lxxii. 6, civ. 13. Compare Deut. xi. 14, xxxii. 2. 




128 


SINAI' AND PALESTINE. 


flat from which it rises on the east and south. This pro¬ 
bably is at least one signification of the earliest name by 
which not Palestine alone, but the whole chain of mountains 
of which it is an offshoot, was called,—“ Aram/' or the 
“ highlands,” as distinguished from “ Canaan,” “ the low¬ 
lands ” or plain of the seacoast on the west, and the 
“ Beka ” or great plain of the Mesopotamian deserts on 
the east. “ Aram,” 1 (or Syria , the word by which the 
Greeks translated the word into their own language,) seems 
to have been the general appellation of the whole sweep 
of mountains which enclose the western plains of Asia, 
and which were thus designated, like the various ranges 
of Maritime, Graian, Pennine, and Julian Alps, by 
some affix or epithet to distinguish one portion from 
another. 

However this may be, there can be no doubt that in 
Palestine we are in the “ Highlands ” of Asia. This was 
the more remarkable in connection with the Israelites, 
because they were the only civilised nation then existing 
in the world, which dwelt in a mountainous country. The 
great states of Egypt, of Assyria, of India, 2 rose in the 
plains formed by the mighty rivers of those empires. The 
mountains from which those rivers descended were the 
haunts of the barbarian races who, from time to time, 
descended to conquer or ravage these rich and level tracts. 
But the Hebrew people was raised above the other ancient 


1 “ Aram-Naharaim,” “ the highlands 
of the two rivers,” (the word trans¬ 
lated “ Mesopotamia ” by the Greek, 
the Latin, and the English versions), 
Gen. xxiv. 10, Dent, xxiii. 4, Judges 
iii. 8, 1 Chron. xix. 6, is applied to the 
mountains from which the Euphrates 
and Tigris issue into the plain. It is 
also described, in Numb, xxiii. 7, as 
“Aram, the mountains of the East.” 
“ Padan-Aram ” is “ the cultivated field 
of the highlands,” Gen. xxv. 20, xxviii. 
2,5, 6, 7, xlviii. 7; apparently either an 
upland vale in the hills, or a fertile dis¬ 
trict immediately at their feet. That 
this is the meaning of “ Padan,” appears 
both from its derivation from “Padah ” 
=“ plough”—(see Gesenius, in voce )— 
and from the equivalent “Sadeh”= 
“cultivated field ”— arvum ,—used for it 


in Hosea xii. 12 (though here translated 
‘country’). “Aram of Damascus,” (2 
Sam. viii. 6) is “ the highlands above 
Damascus,” to which, in later times, the 
word “Aram,” (“Syria”) became almost 
entirely restricted, as in Isa. vii. 1,8; 
Amos i. 5; 1 Kings xv. 18 ; and so 
the lesser principalities of the same 
region are called “ Aram Zobah,” 
“ Aram Maachah,” “ Aram Beth-lle- 
hob.” To Palestine itself it is never 
applied in the ^Scriptures, but the con¬ 
stant designation of the country by 
Greek writers (see Reland, cap. viii.), 
is “Syria Palaestina,” which, in its 
Hebrew equivalent, would be “Aram 
Philistim.” For the meaning of Syria, 
see Chapter VI. 

2 See the fact well given in Hegel’s 
Philosophy of History, c. 1. 


PALESTINE. 


129 


states, equally in its moral and in its physical relations. 
From the Desert of Arabia to Hebron is a continual ascent, 
and from that ascent there is no descent of any importance 
except to the plains of the Jordan, Esdraelon, and the 
coast . 1 To “go down into Egypt/' to “go up into Canaan," 
were expressions as true as they are frequent in the account 
of the Patriarchal migrations to and fro between the two 
countries. From a mountain sanctuary, as it were, Israel 
looked over the world. “ The mountain of the Lord’s 
house,"—“ established on the tops of the mountains,"— 
“ exalted above the hills," — to which “ all nations 
should go up ," 2 was the image in which the prophets 
delighted to represent the future glory of their country. 

{ When “ the Lord had a controversy with his people," it 
was to be “ before the mountains and the hills,” and “the 
strong foundations of the earth." 3 When the messengers 
of glad tidings returned from the captivity, their feet were 
“ beautiful upon the mountains ." 4 It was to the 
“ mountains " of Israel that the exile lifted up his eyes, 
as the place “from whence his help came ." 5 To the 
oppressed it was “ the mountains" that brought “judg¬ 
ment, and the hills righteousness.” 6 “ My mountains "— 

“ my holy mountain," 7 —are expressions for the whole 
country . 8 

One striking consequence of this elevation of the whole 
mass of the country is that every high point in it 
commands a prospect of greater extent than is common in 
ordinary mountain districts. On almost every eminence 
there is an opportunity for one of those wide views or 
surveys which abound in the history of Palestine, and 
which, more than anything else, connect together our 
impression of events and of the scene on which they 
were enacted. There are first the successive views of 
Abraham ; as when on “ the mountain east of Bethel," “ Lot 
lifted up his eyes, and beheld all the plain of Jordan,"— 

1 See Chapter I. Part ii. p. 102. 7 Isa. xi. 9; xiv. 25; lvii. 13; 

2 Isa. ii. 2, 3. lxv. 9. 

3 Micah. vi. 1, 2. 8 This whole aspect of the country 

4 Isa. lii. 7. is caught by Rauwulf with intelligence 

» p 8 . cxxi. 1. remarkable for so early a traveller 

6 Ps. lxxii. 3. (Travels, p. 220, 221). 

K 


The views 
of Sacred 
History. 


Of Lot, 





130 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


Abraham, 


Balaam, 


Moses ; 


and of the 
Tempta¬ 
tion. 


and Abraliam “ lifted up his eyes, and looked from 
the place where he was, northward, and southward, and 
eastward, and westward ; ” 1 or again, when “ Abraham 
looked towards Sodom and Gomorrah . . . and beheld, 
and lo the* smoke of the country went up as the smoke of 
a furnace; ” or yet again, when “ he lifted up his eyes, 
and saw the place afar off in the land of Moriah .” 2 In 
the later history there is unfolded still more distinctly the 
view of Balaam from the “ high places of Moab,” where 
“ from the top of the rocks he saw,” “ from the hills he 
beheld,” not only “ the tents of Jacob” and the “ taber¬ 
nacles of Israel,” with their future greatness rising far in 
the distance, but the surrounding nations also, whose fate 
was interwoven with theirs—and he thought of Edom 
and Seir, and “ looked on Amalek,” and “ looked on the 
Kenite .” 3 And close upon this follows the view—the 
most famous in all time, the proverb of all languages— 
when from that same spot—“the field of Zophim on 
the top of Pisgah,” 4 —Moses, from “the mountain of 
Nebo, the top of Pisgah,” saw “all the land of Gilead 
unto Dan, and all Naphthali, and the land of Ephraim 
and Manasseh, and all the land of Judah unto the utmost 
sea, and the south, and the plain of Jericho, the city 
of palm-trees, unto Zoar.” 5 Such, too, in vision, was the 
“ very high mountain, in the land of Israel,” from which 
Ezekiel saw the “frame of the city,” and “the waters issuing 
to the east country,” “the desert,” and “the sea.” 6 Such— 
in vision, also—was the mountain “exceeding high,” which 
revealed on the day of the Temptation “ all the kingdoms 
of the world and the glory of them.” 7 Such—not in 
vision, but in the most certain reality, was that double 
view of Jerusalem from Mount Olivet—the first, when, at 
the sudden turn of the road from Bethany, “ He beheld the 
city, and wept over it,” the second, when “ He sat on the 


1 Gen. xiii. 10, 14. See Chapter IV. 

2 Gen. xix. 28 ; xxii. 4. See Chapters 

V. VI. 

3 Numb. xxii. 41; xxiii. 9 ; xxiv. 5. 
17, 18, 20, 21. See Chapter VII. 

4 Numb, xxiii. 14. 


5 Deut. xxxiv. 1—3. See Chapter 
VII. 

6 Ezek. xl. 2; xlvii. 8. See Chapter 
VII. 

7 Matt. iv. 8. See Chapter VIII. 


PALESTINE. 


Mount of Olives, over against the Temple/' and saw those 
“great buildings/' 1 

Other prospects such as of Jacob from Mahanaim, of 
Deborah from Mount Tabor, of Solomon from Gibeon, 
though not detailed, can well be imagined; others, again, 
though belonging to later times, are yet full of interest— 
the view, whether historical or legendary, of Mahomet 2 
over Damascus; the view of Jerusalem, as Titus saw it 
from the heights of Scopus, or as it burst, eleven centuries 
later, on the Crusading armies at the same spot, or as 
the pilgrims beheld it from “ Montjoye." 3 

To all these I shall return in detail as we come to them 
in their several localities. No other history contains so 
many of these points of contact between the impressions 
of life and the impressions of outward scenery. But, 
besides this imaginative result, if one may so say, the 
mountainous character of Palestine is intimately con¬ 
nected with its history, both religious and political. 

2. The infinite multiplication of these hills renders in¬ 
telligible two points constantly recurring in the history 
of the Jewish people — the “fenced cities" and the The Fenced 
“ high places." From the earliest times of the occupation Cltles: 
of the country by a civilised and stationary people, we 
hear of the cities great and “ walled up to heaven, /' which 
terrified the Israelite spies; of the “fenced cities" attacked 
by Sennacherib, of the various hill-forts, Jotapata, Masada, 

Bether, which in the last Jewish wars held out against 
the Roman forces. This is still the appearance of the 
existing villages or ruined cities, chiefly indeed in Judaea, 
but also throughout the country, in this respect more like 
the towns of the aboriginal inhabitants of Italy—“prse- 
ruptis oppida saxis "—than those of any other country. 

A city in a valley, instead of being as elsewhere the rule, 
is here the exception ; every valley has its hill, and on 
that hill a city is set that “ cannot be hid." From still 
earlier times, the same tendency is observable in their 
religious history. These multiplied heights were so 

1 Luke xix. 41; Mark xiii. 2. See 
Chapter III. 


2 See Chapter XII. 

3 See Chapter IV. 






132 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


and High 
Places. 


Political 
divisions 
and con¬ 
quests. 


Highlands 
and low¬ 
lands. 


many natural altars: at Bethel, 1 on Moriah, 2 at Dan, 3 at 
Gibeon, 4 on Mount Zion, 5 on Olivet, 6 altars were succes¬ 
sively erected. The national worship down to the time 
of Hezekiah may almost be said to have been a religion 
of high places. There was no one height of itself sufficient 
to command universal acquiescence. In this equality of 
mountains, all were alike eligible. 

3. Again, the combination of this mass of hills with its 
border plains and with the deserts from which it rises, 
has deeply affected its political and military history. The 
allocation of the particular portions of Palestine to its 
successive inhabitants, will best appear as we proceed. But 
the earliest and most fundamental distributions of territory 
are according to the simple division of the country into 
its highlands and lowlands. “ The Amalekites,” that is, 
the Bedouin tribes, “ dwell in the land of the south,” that 
is, on the desert frontier,—“and the Hittites and the 
Jebusites and the Amorites dwell in the mountains/’ that 
is, the central mass of hills—“ and the Canaanites dwell 
by the sea and by the ‘ side’ of Jordan,” 7 that is, on the 
western and eastern plains. And of the early inhabi¬ 
tants thus enumerated, those who at least by their names 
are brought into the sharpest geographical contrast, are 
the Amorites or “dwellers on the summits,” and the 
Canaanites or “ lowlanders.” 8 

But it is in the history of the conquest of Palestine, 
that this peculiarity is most strongly brought out. In 
most countries which consist of mountains and lowlands, 
two historical results are observable; first, that, in the case 
of invasion, the aboriginal inhabitants are driven to the 
mountains, and the plains have fallen into the hands of the 
conquerors ; secondly, that, in the case of semi-barbarous 
countries so situated, the plains are the secure, the moun¬ 
tains the insecure parts of the region. In Palestine, both 
these results are reversed. Although some few of the 


1 Gen. xii. 8. 

2 Gen. xxii. 4. 

3 Judges xviii. 30. 

4 1 Kings iii. 4 ; 2 Chron. i. 3. 

5 2 Sam. vi. 17. 

6 2 Sam. xv. 32; 1 Kings xi. 7. 


7 Numb. xiii. 29. Compare Joshua 
xi. 3. 

8 See Ewald (2nd edit.), i. 315 ; and 
Gesenius, in vocibus. Compare Deut. i, 
7, 19, 20, 44, “ The mountain of the 
Amorites.” 


PALESTINE. 


133 


ancient Amorite tribes, such as the Jebusites, retained 
their strongholds in the hills for many years after the 
first conquest of Joshua, yet by far the majority of 
instances recorded as resisting the progress of the con¬ 
querors are in the plains. The hills of Judah and 
Ephraim were soon occupied, but “ Manasseh could not 
drive out the inhabitants of Bethshan, . . nor Taanach, 

. . nor Dor, . . . nor Ibleam, . . . nor Megiddo, . . 
[from the plains of Esdraelon and Sharon], but the 
Canaanites would dwell in the land. Neither did 
Asher drive out the inhabitants of Accho, . . nor of 
Zidon, . . nor . . of Achzib . . [in the bay of Acre, 
and the coast of Phoenicia] . . but the Asherites dwelt 
among the Canaanites, the inhabitants of the land, for 
they did not drive them out.” 1 “ And the Amorites 

forced the children of Dan into the mountain, for they 
would not suffer them to come down into the valley. But 
the Amorites would dwell in Mount Heres in Aijalon and 
Shaalbim, yet the hand of the house of Joseph prevailed, 
so that they became tributaries.” 2 We are not left to 
conjecture as to one at least of the reasons. “ The Lord 
was with Judah, and he drave out the inhabitants of the 
mountain; but could not drive out the inhabitants of the 
valley —because they had chariots of iron” 3 The Israelites 
were a nation of infantry. Their nomadic life, in this 
respect, differing from that of the modern Bedouins, was 
without horses ; and even after their settlement in Palestine, 
horses and chariots were unknown as a national possession 
until the reign of Solomon. The Canaanites, on the contrary, 
were famous for their chariots. One chief alone is described 
as possessing “ nine hundred 4 and even after the partial 
introduction of them during the Jewish monarchy, the 
contrast between the infantry of the Israelites and the 
chariots of the armies from Damascus, suggested the same 
comparison that might have been made by the Canaanites 
in the days of Joshua. “Their gods are gods of the 
‘mountains ;’ therefore they are stronger thaji we; but 
let us fight against them in the 4 level/ and surely we shall 

1 Judges i. 27—32. 3 Judges i. 19. See also Josh. xvii. 16. 

2 Ibid. 34. 4 Jabin : Judges, iv. 3. 





134 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


Distinction 

between 


be stronger than they.” A glance at the description of 
Palestine given above, will show how exactly this tallies 
with the actual results. Roads for wheeled vehicles are now 
unknown in any part of Palestine; and in the earlier 
history they are very rarely mentioned as a general means 
of communication. The “ chariots” 1 of Jehu and of Ahab 
are only described as driven along the plain of Esdraelon. 
Under the Romans, indeed, the same astonishing genius 
for road-making which carried the Yia Flaminia through 
the Apennines, and has left traces of itself in the narrow 
pass of the Scironian rocks, may have increased the faci¬ 
lities of communication in Palestine, and hence, perhaps, 
the mention of the chariot-road through the pass from 
Jerusalem to Gaza, 2 where the Ethiopian met Philip. But 
under ordinary circumstances, they must have always been 
more or less impracticable in the mountain regions. It 
was in the plains, accordingly, that the enemies of Israel 
were usually successful. 

Another cause, not indeed for the success of the 
Canaanites’ resistance, but for the tenacity with which 
they clung to the plains, is to be seen in their great 
superiority both for agricultural and nomadic purposes 
to anything in the hills of Judaea or Ephraim. “ Judah,” 
we are told, at first “ took Gaza, and Askelon, and 
Ekron.” But these cities, with their coasts, soon fell 
again into the hands of the Philistines, whether the old 
inhabitants, or, as there is some reason to think, a new 
race of settlers, subsequent to the first conquest. And 
then, for more than four centuries, a struggle was main¬ 
tained till the reign of David. It was the richest portion 
of the country, and the Philistines might well fight for 
it to the last gasp. In the same way, Tyre and Sidon, 
Accho and Gaza, cared but little for the new comers, 
if they could but retain their hold on the corn-fields and 
the sea. 3 

And this brings us to the other peculiarity which dis¬ 
tinguishes Palestine at the present day, from other half- 

1 The only exceptions are the cha* 1 Kings xxii. 38 ; 2 Kings ix. 28, 
riots in which the royal corpses were xxiii. 30. 

carried to Samaria and Jerusalem. 3 Acts viii. 28. 3 See Chapter VI. 


PALESTINE. 


135 


civilised regions. In Greece and Italy and Spain, it is 
the mountainous tract which is beset with banditti—the 
level country which is safe. In Palestine, on the con¬ 
trary, the mountain tracts are comparatively secure, 
though infested by villages of hereditary ruffians here 
and there; but the plains, with hardly an exception, are 
more or less dangerous. Perhaps the most striking con¬ 
trast is the passage from the Hauran and plain of Damas¬ 
cus, to the uplands of the Lebanon and Anti-Lebanon, with 
their quiet villages, and fruit-gardens, breathing an atmos¬ 
phere almost of European comfort and security. The cause 
is soon told. Palestine, as we have before seen, is an island 
in a desert waste—but from this very fact it is also an 
island in the midst of pirates. The Bedouin tribes are the 
corsairs of the wilderness; the plains which run into the 
mountains are the creeks into which they naturally pene¬ 
trate. Far up the plains of Philistia and Sharon come the 
Arabs of the Tih ; deep into the centre of Palestine, into 
the plain of Esdraelon, especially when the harvest has left 
the fields clear for pasturage, come the Arabs of the Hauran 
and of Gilead. The same levels which of old gave an 
opening to the chariots of the Canaanites, now admit the 
inroad of these wandering shepherds. On one occasion, 
even in ancient times, there was a migration of Bedouins 
into Palestine on a gigantic scale ; when the Midianites 
and Amalekites, and children of the east, encamped against 
the Israelites in the maritime plain, “ with their cattle and 
their tents,” and “ pitched” their tents in Esdraelon, and 
“ lay along the valley like grasshoppers for multitude.” 1 
This, doubtless, was a great exception, and in the 
flourishing times of the Jewish Monarchy and of the 
Homan Empire, the hordes of the Desert were kept out, 
or were, as in the case of the tribes of Petra in the time 
of the Herods, brought within the range of a partial 
civilisation. But now, like the sands of their own 
deserts which engulf the monuments of Egypt, no 
longer defended by a watchful and living population, 
they have broken in upon the country far and near ; 


Palestine 
and other 
half civil¬ 
ised coun¬ 
tries. 


Judges vi. 3, 5, 33; vii. 12. See Chapter IX. 








136 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


Scenery of 
Palestine. 


Character 
of hills. 


and in the total absence of solitary dwelling-places—in 
the gathering together of all the settled inhabitants into 
villages,—and in the walls which, as at Jerusalem, enclose 
the cities round, with locked gates and guarded towers— 
we see the effect of the constant terror which they in¬ 
spire. It is the same peculiarity of Eastern life, as was 
exhibited in its largest proportions in the vast fortifica¬ 
tions with which Nineveh and Babylon shut themselves in 
against the attacks of the Bedouins of the Assyrian Desert, 
and in the great wall which still defends the Chinese 
empire against the Mongolian tribes, who are to the 
civilisation of northern Asia, what the Arabs are to that 
of the south. 

VIII. What has already been said of the physical con¬ 
figuration of the country, must to a great extent have antici¬ 
pated what can be said of its scenery. Yet the character of 
scenery depends so much on its form and colour, as well as 
its material—on its expression as well as its features—that, 
unless something more is said, we shall have but a faint 
image of what was presented to the view of Patriarch or 
Prophet, King or Psalmist. Those who describe Palestine 
as beautiful must have either a very inaccurate notion of 
what constitutes beauty of scenery, or must have viewed 
the country through a highly coloured medium. As a 
general rule, not only is it without the two main 
elements of beauty—variety of outline and variety of 
colour—but the features rarely so group together as to 
form any distinct or impressive combination. The tangled 
and featureless hills of the lowlands of Scotland 1 and 
North Wales are perhaps the nearest likeness accessible 
to Englishmen, of the general landscape of Palestine south 
of the plain of Esdraelon. 

1. Rounded hills, chiefly of a gray colour 2 —gray partly 
from the limestone of which they are all formed, partly 
from the tufts of gray shrub with which their sides are 
thinly clothed, and from the prevalence of the olive— 

1 Compare Miss Martineau, Eastern 2 This gray colour is exchanged for 
Life, Part III. c. 1. Dr. Richardson white in the hills immediately east- 
compares the approach from Jaffa to the ward of Jerusalem. See Chapter I. 
road between Sanquhar* and Leadhill Part ii. p. 102. 

(ii. 223). 


PALESTINE. 


137 


their sides formed into concentric rings of rock, which 
must have served in ancient times as supports to the 
terraces, of which there are still traces to their very 
summits; valleys, or rather the meetings of these gray 
slopes with the beds of dry watercourses at their feet 
—long sheets of bare rock 1 laid like flagstones, side by 
side, along the soil—these are the chief features of the 
greater part of the scenery of the historical parts of Pales¬ 
tine. 2 In such a landscape the contrast of every exception 
is doubly felt. The deep shade of the mountain wall 
beyond the Jordan,—or again the level plains of the coast 
and of Esdraelon, each cut out of the mountains as if with 
a knife,—become striking features where all else is mono¬ 
tonous. The eye rests with peculiar eagerness on the few 
instances in which the gentle depressions become deep 
ravines, as in those about Jerusalem, or those leading 
down to the valley of the Jordan ; or in which the moun¬ 
tains assume a bold and peculiar form, as Lebanon and 
Hermon at the head of the whole country, or Tabor, Nebi- 
Samuel, and the “ Frank mountain,” in the centre of the 
hills themselves. 

2. These rounded hills, occasionally stretching into Vegetation, 
long undulating ranges, are for the most part bare of 
wood. Forest and large timber (with a few exceptions, 
hereafter to be mentioned,) are not known. Cornfields 
and, in the neighbourhood of Christian populations 
as at Bethlehem, 3 vineyards creep along the ancient 
terraces. In the spring, the hills and valleys are 
covered with thin grass and the aromatic shrubs which 
clothe more or less almost the whole of Syria and Arabia. 

But they also glow with what is peculiar to Palestine, a 
profusion of wild flowers, daisies, the white flower called 
the Star of Bethlehem, but especially with a blaze of 
scarlet flowers of all kinds, chiefly anemones, wild tulips, 
and poppies. 4 Of all the ordinary aspects of the country, 

1 Well described by Richardson, ii. repulsive barrenness, with nothing to 

374 , relieve the eye or captivate the fancy.” 

2 Keith, in his Land of Israel, has (P. 429.) See Appendix, in v. Gibeah. 

exactly caught this character. “ The 3 Well described in Lynch’s Expedi- 

rounded and rocky hills of Judsea swell tion, p. 225. 

out in empty, unattractive, and even 4 See Chap. I. Part ii. p. 100. 




138 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


Trees. 


Olives. 


Cedars : 


this blaze of scarlet colour is perhaps the most peculiar ; 
and, to those who first enter the Holy Land, it is no 
wonder that it has suggested the touching and significant 
name of “ the Saviour's blood-drops." 

It is this contrast between the brilliant colours of the 
flowers and the sober hue of the rest of the landscape, 
that gives force to the words,—“ Consider the lilies 
of the field. . . For I say unto you, that Solomon in 
all his glory was not arrayed like one of these." 1 
Whatever was the special flower designated by the lily of 
the field, the rest of the passage indicates that it was of 
the gorgeous hues which might be compared to the robes 
of the great king. The same remark applies, though in a 
less degree, to the frequent mention of the same flower in 
the Canticles,—“ I am the rose of Sharon, the lily of 
the valleys," “ as the lily among thorns," “ he feedeth 
among the lilies," “ he is gone to gather lilies." 2 

The same general bareness and poverty sets off in 
the same way the rare exceptions in the larger forms 
of vegetable life. The olive, the fig, and the pomegranate, 
which form the usual vegetation of the country, are so 
humble in stature, that they hardly attract the eye till the 
spectator is amongst them. Then indeed the twisted stems 
and silver foliage of the first, the dark broad leaf of the 
second, the tender green and scarlet blossoms of the 
third, are amongst the most beautiful of sights, even when 
stripped of the associations which would make the tamest 
of their kind venerable. On the lower slopes of the hills 
olives especially are more or less thickly scattered, with 
that peculiar colour and form which they share in common 
with those of Greece and of Italy ; to English eyes, best 
represented by aged willows. 3 But there are a few trees 
which emerge from this general obscurity. Foremost 
stand the cedars 4 of Lebanon. In ancient times the sides 


1 See Chapter XIII. 

2 Cant. ii. 1, 2, 16; vi. 2, 3. 

3 Those who have never seen an 
olive tree, must read the description in 
Buskin’s Stones of Venice. Vol. iii. p. 
175—177. 

4 With the exception of the cedars, 


I have confined myself in this enume¬ 
ration strictly to the tx*ees of Palestine. 
But it is worth while to notice that the 
foliage of Anti-Libanus is chiefly that 
of the light poplar, so frequent on the 
table-lands of Spain; of Lebanon, that of 
the pine—whether the mountain pine, or 


PALESTINE. 


139 


of that mountain were covered with them. Now, they 
are only found in one small hollow on its north-western 
slope. But there can be little doubt that they were 
always confined to the range of Lebanon, and-therefore, confined to 
properly speaking, were not trees of Palestine at all . 1 The Lebanon, 
expression of Keble,— 

“ Far o’er the cedar shade some tower of giant old,” 

never could have been true of the woods and ruins of 

I Judaea. It was the very remoteness of this noble tree, 
combined with its majestic height and sweeping branches, 
that made it, one may almost say, an object of religious 
reverence. It is hardly ever named without the addition, 
either of the lofty mountain where it grew,—“ the 
cedars of Lebanon,”—or of some epithet implying its 
grandeur and glory,—“the trees of the Lord,” the “ cedars 
which He hath planted,” “ the tall cedars,” “ the cedars 
high and lifted up,” “ whose height is like the height of 
the cedars,” “ spread abroad like the cedar,” “ with fair 
branches,” “with a shadowing shroud,” “of an high stature,” 

“his top among the thick boughs,” “his height exalted 
above all the trees of the field,” “ his boughs multiplied, 
his branches long,” “ fair in his greatness,” “ in the length 
of his branches,” “ by the multitude of his branches .” 2 
These expressions clearly indicate that to them the cedar 
was a portent, a grand and awful work of God. The 
words would never have been used had it been a familiar 
sight amongst their ordinary gardens, as it is in ours. It 
is said that the clergy of the Greek Church still offer 
up mass under their branches, as though they formed a 
natural temple, and that the Arabs call them the 
“trees of God.” This may now be a homage to the 

the stone pine, such as the forest on the Joppa for the building of the temple, 
plains of Beyrout. See Keith’s Scrip- were within the Jewish dominions at 
ture Lands. There is a beautiful passage that time or not. But the stress laid 
in M. Van de Velde’s Travels, describing on the skill of the Sidonians as wood- 
the cypresses of Lebanon, which are cutters, and the fact that Solomon sent 
occasionally mentioned in the Old his own tax-gatherers there, perhaps 
Testament. implies that they were. 

1 It is not clear from the account in 2 Isa. ii. 13; xxxviL 24 ; Amos, ii. 9 
1 Kings v. whether the cedars of Le- Ezek. xxxi. 3—10; Ps. xxix. 5 ; xcii. 13, 
banon which Hiram’s workmen cut civ. 16. 
down for Solomon, and sent on rafts to 







140 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


Oaks. 


Terebinths. 


Abraham’s 

oak. 


extreme antiquity of those which are left; but it may 
also be a continuation of the ancient feeling towards 
them which filled the hearts of the poets of Israel. 
Another more practical indication of their size, as com¬ 
pared to any Palestine timber, is the fact, that from the 
earliest times they have always been used for all the great 
works of Jewish architecture. They were so employed 
for Solomon’s Temple, and again for the Temple of Zerub- 
babel, when nothing but sheer necessity could have induced 
the impoverished people to send so far for their timber. 1 
They were used yet once again, probably for the last time, 
in Constantine’s Church of the Nativity at Bethlehem. 
When the ceiling of that ancient edifice was last repaired, 
the rafters were no longer from the forests of Lebanon, but 
gifts from our own oaks by King Edward IV. 

Passing from these trees, which, secluded as they are 
in their retired nook on the heights of Lebanon, could 
therefore illustrate the scenery of Palestine only by con¬ 
trast, we come to those, which must always have presented 
striking objects in the view, wherever they appeared. 
The first were those to which the Hebrews in Palestine 
emphatically gave the name of “ the tree,” or “ the strong 
tree,” 2 namely, the “ Turkish oak ” (“ el ” or “ elah,” in 
Arabic Sindian ,) and those to which the same name was 
given by a very slight variation of inflexion ( a allon”) 
—the turpentine or terebinth,—in Arabic Butm. The 
trees are different in kind ; but their general appear¬ 
ance is so similar, as well as the name which the 
Hebrews (doubtless from this similarity) applied to both, 
that they may both be considered together. 3 Probably 
the most remarkable specimen of the oak which the 
traveller sees, is that called “ the oak of Abraham,” near 
Hebron, and of which an elaborate account is given by 
Dr. Robinson. 4 A familiar example of the terebinth is 
that at the north-west corner of the walls of Jerusalem, 

1 Ezra iii 7. guished “as the terebinth (elah) and 

2 The same word, which in the Desert, the oak” (allon). Isaiah vi. 13. But, on 

is applied to the Palm; as in the proper the other hand, they are also con- 
names Elim and Elath (See Chapter I. founded ; the same tree, apparently, 
p. 29),^ and in Chaldee to the tree of which is called elah in Josh. xxiv. 26, 
Daniel’s vision. being called allon in Gen. xxxv. 4. 

3 They are once expressly distin- * 4 Vol. ii. p. 443. 


PALESTINE. 


141 


which forms a marked object in any view including 
that portion of the city. They are both tall and spread¬ 
ing trees, with dark evergreen foliage; and by far the 
largest in height and breadth of any in Palestine. But 
these, too, are rare; and this also is indicated by 
the allusions to them in the Old Testament. In a less 
degree than the cedars of Lebanon, but more frequently, 
from their being brought into closer contact with the 
history of Israel, they are described as invested with 
a kind of religious sanctity, and as landmarks of the 
country, to a degree which would not be possible in more 
thickly wooded regions. Each successive step of the Sacred 
first patriarchal migration is marked by a halt under trees: 
one or more of these towering trees. Under the oak of 
Moreh at Shechem, and the oak of Mamre at Hebron, was 
built the altar and pitched the tent of Abraham. And 
each of these aged trees became the centre of a long 
succession of historical recollection. Underneath the oak Oak^of 
of Moreh, or its successor, 1 Jacob buried, as in a con- ore ’ 
secrated spot, the images and the ornaments of his 
Mesopotamian retainers. In the same place, as it would 
seem, did Joshua set up the “ great stone ” that was “by 
the sanctuary of the Lord; 2 and the tree, or the spot, 
appears to have been known in the time of the Judges, 
as the traditional site of these two events, by the double 
name of the “ oak of the enchantments,” and “ the oak 
of the pillar. ” 3 Still more remarkable was the history 
of the “oak of Mamre.” There are here indeed two of Mamre, 
rival claimants. The LXX, translating the word “ allon ” 
by Spvs, evidently regards it as identical with elah , 
and therefore, as an oak ; and it is curious that the 
only large tree now existing in the neighbourhood, 
is that already alluded to as the chief of a group of 
ilexes in the valley of Eshcol, about a mile from Hebron ; 
and is, in all probability, the same, or in the same 

1 Q en> xxxv. 4. lusion to Gen. xxxv. 4, where the ear- 

2 Joshua xxiv. 26. rings appear to have been amulets, to 

3 Judges ix. 6, 37. In each case mis- prevent the entrance of ill-omened 
translated ‘plain,’ from the Vulgate words, according to a practice reproved 
(convallis). In the second case Meo- by St. Augustine amongst the Christians 
neuim, signifies “ enchantments,” ip al- of Africa, 





142 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


of Bethel, 
and of ‘ The 
wanderers.’ 


situation, as that alluded to in the twelfth century by 
Saewulf, and in the thirteenth and fourteenth by Mande- 
ville and Sanutus, as possessed of extraordinary virtues, 
and the subject of a singular legend. But the tradition in 
the time of Josephus was attached to a terebinth. 1 None 
such now remains; but there can be little doubt that it 
stood within the ancient enclosure which he mentions, 
and of which ruins still remain to the north of Hebron, 
under the name of “ Abraham's house." It was a gigantic 
tree, supposed to be coeval with the creation. In the 
time of Constantine 2 it was hung with images and with 
a picture representing the Entertainment of the Angels— 
and underneath its shade was held a fair, in which 
Christians, Jews, and Arabs assembled every summer to 
traffic, and to honour, each with his own rites, the sacred 
tree and its accompanying figures. Constantine abolished 
the worship and the images, but the tree, with the fair, 
remained to the time of Theodosius. 3 It gave its name 
to the spot, and was still standing within the church 
which was built around it, till the seventh century; and 
in later times marvellous tales were told of its having 
sprung from the staff of one of the angelic visitants, 
and of its blazing with fire yet remaining always fresh. 4 
It is said to have been burnt down in the seventeenth 
century. 5 

These are the two most remarkable of the trees men¬ 
tioned. But there are also others : the “ oak of Bethel," 
under which Deborah, the nurse of Jacob, was interred, 
known by the name of the “terebinth of tears;" 6 the 
“ oaks of the wanderers," under which the nomad tribe 
of the Kenites was encamped in the north. 7 And in all 
these cases, as they had at first been marked out as 
natural resting-places for the patriarchal or Arab encamp¬ 
ments, so they were afterwards in all probability the sacred 
trees and the sacred groves under which altars were built, 


1 Josephus, Bell. Jud. iv. 9, 7. 

2 Eusebius, Vit. Const. 81; Demonst. 
Ev. v. 9. 

3 Socrates, i. 18 ; Sozomen, Jud. xi. 

(Reland, pp. 713, 714.) 


4 Eustathius and Julius Africanus. 
(Reland, p. 712.) 8 Mariti. 

6 Allon-Bachuth. Gen. xxxv. 8. 
where “ an oak,” should be “ the oak.” 

7 “ The plain (oaks) of Zaanaim.” 
Judges, iv. 11. 


PALESTINE. 


143 


partly to the True God, partly to Astarte. One such grove, 
apparently with the remains of a sacred edifice, exists at 
Hazori, near Baneas ; another, of singular beauty, on the 
hill of the lesser sources of the Jordan, at the ancient 
sanctuary of Dan. 1 

These instances are all more or less isolated There 
is one district, however, where the oaks flourished and 
still flourish in such abundance as to constitute almost 
a forest. On the table-lands of Gilead are the thick 
oak-woods of Bashan, often alluded to in the Prophets, 2 as 
presenting the most familiar image of forest scenery— 
famous in history, as the scene of the capture and death 
of Absalom, when he was caught amongst their tangled 
branches. 

Another tree, which breaks the uniformity of the Palms. 
Syrian landscape by the rarity of its occurrence, no 
less than by its beauty, is the Palm. It is a curious 
fact that this stately tree, so intimately connected with 
our associations of Judaea by the Roman coins, which 
represent her seated in captivity under its shade, is now 
almost unknown to her hills and valleys. Two or three 
in the garden of Jerusalem, some few perhaps at 
Nablous, one or two in the plain of Esdraelon—comprise 
nearly all the instances of the palm in central Palestine. 

In former times it was doubtless more common. In the 
valley of the Jordan, one of the most striking features used 
to be the immense palm-grove, seven miles long, which 
surrounded Jericho ;—of which large remains were 1 still 
visible in the seventh century and the twelfth, some even 
in the seventeenth ; 3 and of which relics are still to be 
seen, in the trunks of palms washed up on the shores of 
the Dead Sea, 4 —preserved by the salt with which a long 
submersion in those strange waters has impregnated 
them. En-gedi, too, on the western side of the same lake, 
was known in early times as Hazazon - Tamar, 5 “ the 
felling of palm-trees.” Now not one 6 is to be seen 
in the deep thicket which surrounds its spring, and at 

1 See Chapter XI. 4 Macmichael’s Journey, p. 207. See 

2 Isa. ii. 13; Ezek. xxvii. 6. Chapter VII. 

3 Arculf. (Early Travellers, p. 7.) 5 Gen. xiv. 7; 2 Chr. xx. 2. 

Siewulf (ibid. p. 23.) Shaw. p. 370. 6 Robinson, vol. ii. p. 211. 






144 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


Jericho even the solitary palm, for many years observed 
by travellers as the only remnant of its former glory, 
has disappeared. On Olivet, too, where now nothing is 
to be seen, but the olive and the fig-tree, there must have 
been at least some palms in ancient days. In the time of 
Ezra they went forth unto the mount to fetch for the 
Feast of Tabernacles “ olive-branches, and pine-branches, 
and myrtle-branches, and palm-branches, and branches of 
thick trees.” 1 “ Bethany ” in all probability derives its 

name, “ the house of dates,” from the same cause, and with 
this agrees the fact that the crowd which escorted our Lord 
to Jerusalem from Bethany “ took branches of palm-trees.” 2 
Still, it is probable that even then the palm was rarely 
found on the high land which forms the main portion of 
historical Palestine. It is emphatically, as we have seen 
in the account of Sinai, the “ tree ” of the Desert. It is 
always spoken of in Rabbinical writers as a tree of the 
valleys, 3 not of the mountains. It grows naturally, and 
were it cultivated, might doubtless grow again in the 
tropical climate of the Valley of the Jordan. It is still 
found in great abundance on the maritime plains of 
Philistia and Phoenicia ; and doubtless from the palm- 
groves, which still strike the eye of the traveller in the 
neighbourhood of Jaffa and Beyrout, and which there 
probably first met the eye of the Western world, 
whether Greek, Roman, or Mediaeval, came the name of 
Phoenicia or “ the Land of Palms.” 4 Hence too, at least 
in recent times, came the branches, which distinguished 
the pilgrims of Palestine, from those of Rome, Com- 
postella and Canterbury, by the name of “ Palmer.” 
But the climate of the hill country must always have 
been too cold for their frequent growth. 5 Those on 
Olivet most likely were in gardens ; the very fact of 
the name of the “ City of Palm-trees, ” applied as a 
distinguishing epithet to Jericho—the allusion to the 
palm-tree of En-gedi, as though found there and not 


1 Nehemiah, viii. 15. For the myrtle 2 John, xii. 13. 

treesonor near the same spot at the same 3 See Reland’s Palestine, 306, 368. 

period compare the “ myrtle trees that 4 See Chapter VI. 

were in the bottom,” Zech. i. 8,10,11. 5 Buckingham, p. 217. 


PALESTINE. 


145 


elsewhere—the mention of the palm-tree of Deborah at 
Bethel, 1 as a well-known and solitary landmark— 
probably the same spot as that called Baal-Tamar, 2 “ the 
sanctuary of the palm”—all indicate that the palm 
was on the whole then, as now, the exception and not 
the rule. 

Combined with the palm in ancient times was the Sycomores. 
Sycomore. This too was a tree of the plain, 3 —chiefly of 
the plain of the sea-coast—also, as we know by one cele¬ 
brated instance, 4 in the plains of Jericho. As Jericho 
derived its name from the palms, so did Sycominopolis— 
the modern Caipha,-—from the grove of sycomores, some 
of which still remain in its neighbourhood. 

There is one other tree, which is only to be found on oleanders, 
the tropical banks of the Jordan, but too beautiful to be 
omitted ; the Oleander, with its bright blossoms and dark- 
green leaves, giving the aspect of a rich garden to any 
spot where it grows. It is, however, never alluded to in 
the Scriptures, unless, as has been conjectured, it is the 
“ tree planted by the ‘ streams ’ of water , which bringeth 
forth his fruit in due season/' and “ whose leaf shall not 
wither ” 5 

IX. The geological structure of Palestine, as of Greece, Geological^ 
is almost entirely limestone. The few exceptions are in Palestine! 
the Valley of the Jordan, which must be considered in its 
own place. This rocky character of the whole country 
has not been without its historical results. 

1. Not only does the thirsty character of the whole Wells » 
East give a peculiar expression to any places where 
water may be had, but the rocky soil preserves their 
identity, and the wells of Palestine serve as the links 
by which each successive age is bound to the other, in 
a manner which at first sight would be thought almost 
incredible. The name by which they are called of itself 
indicates their permanent character. The “well" of 
the Hebrew and the Arab is carefully distinguished 

1 Judges iv. 5. 2 Judges xx. 33. also 1 Chr. xxvii. 28. See also the 

3 “ Cedars made he as the sycomore Mishna quoted in Reland’s Palestine, 
trees in the vale (Shefela : i.e. the low pp. 306, 368. 
country of Philistia) for abundance : ” 4 Luke xix. 4. 

1 Kings x. 27, and 2 Chr. i. 15; ix. 27; 6 Ps. i. 3. See Ritter, Jordan, p. 301. 









146 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


and 

Springs. 


from the “ spring." The spring (’ain) is the bright, open 
source—the “ eye " of the landscape—such as bubbles up 
amongst the crags of Sinai, or rushes forth in a copious 
stream from En-gedi or from Jericho. But the well 
{beer) is the deep hole bored far under the rocky 
surface by the art of man—the earliest traces of that 
art which these regions exhibit. By these orifices at the 
foot of the hills, surrounded by their broad margin of 
smooth stone or marble—a rough mass of stone covering 
the top—have always been gathered whatever signs 
of animation or civilisation the neighbourhood afforded. 
They were the scenes of the earliest contentions of the 
shepherd-patriarchs with the inhabitants of the land ; the 
places of meeting with the women who came down to 
draw water from their rocky depths—of Eliezer with 
Rebecca, of Jacob with Rachel, of Moses with Zipporah, 
of Christ with the woman of Samaria. They were the 
natural halting-places of great caravans, or wayfaring 
men, as when Moses gathered together the people to the 
well of Moab, which the princes dug with their sceptered 
staves, 1 and therefore the resort of the plunderers of 
the Desert, of “the noise of archers in the places of 
drawing water." 2 What they were ages ago in each of 
these respects they are still. The shepherds may still 
be seen leading their flocks of sheep and goats to their 
margin ; the women still come with their pitchers and 
talk to those “ who sit by the well;" the traveller still 
looks forward to it as his resting-place for the night, if it 
be in a place of safety ; or, if it be in the neighbourhood 
of the wilder Bedouins, is hurried on by his dragoman or 
his escort without halting a moment; and thus, by their 
means, not only is the image of the ancient life of the 
country preserved, but the scenes of sacred events are 
identified, which under any other circumstances would 
have perished. The wells of Beersheba in the wide 
frontier-valley of Palestine are indisputable witnesses of 
the life of Abraham. 3 The well of Jacob, at Shechem, 
is a monument of the earliest and of the latest events 


1 Numb. xxi. 16, 18. 


2 Judges v. 11. 


3 See Chapter I. Part ii. p. 100. 


PALESTINE. 


147 


of sacred history, of the caution of the prudent patriarch, 
no less than of the freedom of the Gospel there proclaimed 
by Christ. 1 

2. Next to the wells of Syria, the most authentic Sepulchres, 
memorials of past times are the Sepulchres, and partly for 
the same reason. 

The tombs of ancient Greece or Rome lined the public 
roads with funeral pillars or towers. Grassy graves and 
marble monuments fill the churchyards and churches of 
Christian Europe. But the sepulchres of Palestine were, 
like the habitations of its earliest inhabitants, hewn out of 
the living limestone rock, and therefore indestructible as 
the rock itself. In this respect they resembled, though 
on a smaller scale, the tombs of Upper Egypt, and as 
there the traveller of the nineteenth century is confronted 
with the names and records of men who lived thousands 
of years ago, so also, in the excavations of the valleys 
which surround or approach Shiloh, Shechem, Bethel, and 
Jerusalem, he knows that he sees what were the last 
resting-places of the generations contemporary with Joshua, 

Samuel, and David. And the example of Egypt shows 
that the identification of these sepulchres even with their 
individual occupants is not so improbable as might be 
otherwise supposed. If the graves of Rameses and Osirei 
can still be ascertained, there is nothing improbable in 
the thought that the tombs of the patriarchs may have 
survived the lapse of twenty or thirty centuries. The 
rocky cave on Mount Hor must be at least the spot 
believed by Josephus to mark the grave of Aaron. The 
tomb of Joseph must be near one of the two monuments 
pointed out as such in the opening of the vale of 
Shechem. The sepulchre which is called the tomb of 
Rachel exactly agrees with the spot described as “a 
little way ” from Bethlehem. 2 The tomb of David, which 
was known with certainty at the time of the Christian 
era, may perhaps still be found under the mosque which 
bears his name on the modern Zion. 3 Above all, the Cave 

1 See Chapter V. . _ _ 

2 Gen. xxxv. 16. There is a cave underneath it. See Schwarze, p. 110. 

3 See Chapter XIV. 

l 2 






148 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


of Machpelah is concealed, beyond all reasonable doubt, by 
the mosque at Hebron. 1 But with these exceptions, we 
must rest satisfied rather with the general than the 
particular interest of the tombs of Palestine. The proof 
of identity in each special instance depends almost entirely 
on the locality. Instead of the acres of inscriptions which 
cover the tombs of Egypt, not a single letter has been found 
in any ancient sepulchre of Palestine; and tradition is, 
in this class of monuments, found to be unusually falla¬ 
cious. Although some of those which are described as 
genuine by Jewish authorities can neither be rejected nor 
received with positive assurance, such as the alleged 
sepulchres of Deborah, Barak, Abinoam, Jael, and Heber, 
at Kedesh ; 2 and of Phinehas, Eleazar, and Joshua, in the 
eastern ranges of Sliechem ; 3 yet the passion of the Mus¬ 
sulman conquerors of Syria for erecting mosques over 
the tombs of celebrated saints (and such to them are all 
the heroes of the Old Testament) has created so many 
fictitious sepulchres, as to throw doubt on all. Such are 
the tombs of Seth and Noah, in the vale of the Lebanon ; 
of Moses, on the west of the Jordan, in direct contra¬ 
diction to the Mosaic narrative; of Samuel, on the top 
of Nebi-Samuel; of Sidon and Zebulon near Zidon and 
Tyre ; of Hoshea, in Gilead; of Jonah, thrice over, in 
Judaea, in Phoenicia, and at Nineveh. 

Even the most genuine sepulchres are received as 
such by the highest Mussulman authorities on grounds 
the most puerile. The mosque of Hebron is justly claimed 
by them as the sanctuary of the tomb of Abraham, but 
their reason for believing it is thus gravely stated in the 
“ Torch of Hearts/' a work written by the learned Ali, 
son of Jafer-ar-Rayz, “on the authenticity of the tombs 
of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob." “ I rely," he says, “ on 
the testimony of Abu Horairah, who thus expresses 
himself:—It was said by the Apostle of God. ‘ When the 
angel Gabriel made me take the nocturnal flight to 
Jerusalem, we passed over the tomb of Abraham, and he 
said, Descend, and make a prayer with two genuflexions, 


See Chapter I. Part ii. p. 103. 2 Schwarze, 188. 3 Ibid. 147, 150, 151. 


PALESTINE. 


149 


for here is the sepulchre of thy father Abraham. Then 
we passed Bethlehem, and he said, Descend, for here was 
born thy brother Jesus. Then we came to Jerusalem/ ” 1 

It may be well to notice the probable cause of this un¬ 
certainty of Jewish, as contrasted with the certainty of 
Egyptian and, we might add, of European tradition on the 
subject of tombs. However strongly the reverence for 
sacred graves may have been developed in the Jews of 
later times, the ancient Israelites never seem to have 
entertained the same feeling of regard for the resting- 
places or the remains of their illustrious dead, as was 
carried to so high a pitch in the earlier Pagan and in 
the later Christian world. “ Let me bury my dead out 
of my sight”—“No man knoweth of his sepulchre unto 
this day/' 2 —express, if not the general feeling of the 
Jewish nation, at least the general spirit of the Old 
Testament. Every one knows the most signal instance in 
which this indifference was manifested. Somewhere, 
doubtless, near the walls of the old Jerusalem, or buried 
under its ruins, is the “ new sepulchre hewn in the rock,” 
where “ the body of Jesus was laid,” but the precise spot, 
never indicated by the Evangelists, was probably unknown 
to the next generation, and will, in all likelihood, remain a 
matter of doubt always. 3 In this respect the controversy 
regarding the Holy Sepulchre is an illustration of a general 
fact in sacred topography. Modern pilgrims are troubled 
at the supposition that such a locality should have been 
lost. The Israelites and the early Christians would have 
been surprised if it had been preserved. 

3. But the tombs are only one class of a general pecu¬ 
liarity, resulting from the physical structure of Palestine. 

Like all limestone formations, the hills of Palestine 
abound in caves. How great a part the caverns of Greece 
played in the history and mythology of that country is 
well known. In one respect, indeed, those of Palestine 
were never likely to have been of the same importance, 
because, not being stalactitic, they could not so forcibly 
suggest to the Canaanite wanderers the images of sylvan 

3 Gen. xxiii. 4; Deut. xxxiv. 6. 

3 See Chapter XIV. 


Caves, 


1 Ibn Batouhah, 116. 




150 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


in ancient 
times. 


deities, which the Grecian shepherds naturally found 
in the grottoes of Parnassus and Hymettus. But from 
other points of view we never lose sight of them. In 
these innumerable rents, and cavities, and holes, we see 
the origin of the sepulchres, which still, partly natural, 
and partly artificial, perforate the rocky walls of the 
Judaean valleys ; the long line of tombs, of which I have 
just spoken, beginning with the cave of Machpelah and 
ending with the grave of Lazarus, which was “ a cave, 
and a stone lay upon it/’ and “ the. sepulchre hewn in 
the rock, wherein never man before was laid.” We see 
in them also, the hiding-places which served sometimes 
for defence of robbers and insurgents, sometimes for the 
refuge of those “ of whom the world was not worthy 
the prototype of the catacombs of the early Chris¬ 
tians, of the caverns of the Yaudois and the Cove¬ 
nanters. The cave of Lot at Zoar; the cave of the 
five kings at Makkedah ; the “ caves and dens and 
strongholds,” and “rocks” and “pits” and “holes,” in 
which the Israelites took shelter from the Midianites in 
the time of Gideon, 1 from the Philistines in the time of 
Saul; 2 the cleft 3 of the cliff Etam, into which Samson 
went down to escape the vengeance of his enemies ; the 
caves 4 of David at Adullam, and at Maon, and of Saul 
at En-gedi; the cave in which Obadiah hid the prophets 
of the Lord 5 ; the caves of the robber-hordes above 
the plain of Gennesareth 6 ; the sepulchral caves of 
the Gadarene demoniacs 7 : the cave of Jotapata, 8 where 
Josephus and his countrymen concealed themselves in 
their last struggle,—continue from first to last what has 
truly been called the “cave-life” of the Israelite nation. 
The stream of their national existence, like the actual 
streams of the Grecian rivers, from time to time disap¬ 
pears from the light of day, and runs under ground in 

1 Judges vi. 2. forth out of the holes where they had 

2 1 Sam. xiii. 6; xiv. 11. hid themselves.” See Chapter IV. 

3 Judges xv. 8. So it should be ren- 4 1 Sam. xxii. 1; xxiii. 25; xxiv. 3. 

dered. The passage is interesting, as 5 1 Kings, xviii. 4,13; see Chapter IX. 

illustrating the peculiar character of 6 Josephus, Bell. Jud. I. xvi. 2—4. 

some of the hiding-places—not what we 7 Mark v. 3. 

should call caves—but holes sunk in 8 Josephus, Vita, 74, 75. 

the earth. " Behold the Hebrews come 


PALESTINE. 


151 


these subterraneous recesses,—to burst forth again when 
the appointed moment arrives, 1 —a striking type, as it is 
a remarkable instance, of the preservation of the spiritual 
life of the Chosen People, “ burning, but not consumed,’" 
“ chastened, but not killed.” 

In older times, there is no proof that these ancient 
grottoes were used for worship, either Canaanitish or 
Israelite. The “green trees,” the “high places,” served alike 
for the altars of the Lord, and for those of Baal and 
Aslitaroth. The free and open heavens for the one worship, 
the unrestricted sight of the sun and the host of heaven for 
the other, were alike alien to the sepulchral darkness of 
the holes and caverns of the rocks. The one instance of 
a cave, dedicated to religious worship before the fall 
of the Jewish nation, is that at the sources of the Jordan, 
consecrated by foreign settlers as a sanctuary of their 
own Grecian Pan. 2 But the moment that the religion of 
Palestine fell into the hands of Europeans, it is hardly 
too much to say that, as far as sacred traditions are con¬ 
cerned, it became “a religion of caves”—of those very caves 
which in earlier times had been unhallowed by any 
religious influence whatever. Wherever a sacred asso¬ 
ciation had to be fixed, a cave was immediately selected 
or found as its home. First in antiquity is the grotto of 
Bethlehem, already in the second century regarded by 
popular belief as the scene of the Nativity. Next comes the 
grotto on Mount Olivet, selected as the scene of our 
Lord’s last conversations before the Ascension. These 
two caves, as Eusebius emphatically asserts, were the first 
seats of the worship established by the Empress Helena, 
to which was shortly afterwards added a third—the 
sacred cave of the Sepulchre. To these were rapidly 
added the cave of the Invention of the Cross, the cave 
of the Annunciation at Nazareth, the cave of the Agony 
at Gethsemane, the cave of the Baptist in the “ wilderness 
of St. John,” the cave of the shepherds of Bethlehem. 
And then again, partly perhaps the cause, partly the 
effect of this consecration of grottoes, began the caves of 

1 See Hengstenberg on Psalm lvii. 1; Ewald’s Geschichte, vol. v. p. 25. 

2 See Chapter XI. 


Caves in 
modern 
times. 




SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


hermits. There was the cave of St. Pelagia on Mount 
Olivet, the cave of St. Jerome, St. Paula, and St. Eustochium 
at Bethlehem, the cave of St. Saba in the ravines of the 
Kedron, the remarkable cells hewn or found in the 
precipices of the Quarantania or Mount of the Temptation 
above Jericho. In some few instances this selection of grot¬ 
toes would coincide with the events thus intended to be per¬ 
petuated, as for example the hiding-places of the prophets 
on Carmel, and the sepulchres of the patriarchs and of our 
Lord. But in most instances the choice is made without 
the sanction, in some instances, in defiance, of the sacred 
narrative. No one would infer from the mention of the 
“ inn ” or “ house ” of the Nativity, or of the entrance of 
the Angel of the Annunciation to Mary, that those events 
took place in caves. The very fact that, in the celebrated 
legend, it is a house, and not a grotto, which is transplanted 
to Loretto, is an indication of what would be the natural 
belief. All our common feelings are repugnant to the 
transference of the scenes of the Agony and Ascension 
from the free and open sides of the mountain to the 
narrow seclusion of subterraneous excavations. It is 
possible, as we are often reminded, that the very fact of 
caverns being so frequently used for places of dwelling and 
resort in Palestine, would account for the absence of a 
more specific allusion to them ; for grottoes are stables 
at Bethlehem still; and the lower stories of houses at 
Nazareth are excavated in the rock. But the more 
probable explanation is to be found in the fact, that 
after the devastating storm of the Boman conquest had 
swept away the traces of sacred recollections in human 
habitations, the inhabitants or pilgrims who came to 
seek them, would seek and find them in the most 
strongly marked features of the neighbourhood. These, 
as we have seen, would be the caves. Helena, by the con¬ 
secration of two of the most remarkable, would set the 
example ; the practice of the hermits, already begun in 
the rock-hewn tombs of Egypt, would encourage the 
belief of this sanctity. And thus the universality of the 
connection between grottoes and sacred events, which in 
later times provokes suspicion, in early times would only 


PALESTINE. 


153 


render the minds of pilgrims more callous' to the improba¬ 
bilities of each particular instance. 1 

4. I have dwelt at length on the history of the caves, 
because it is the only instance of a close connection 
between the history or the religion of Palestine, and any 
of its more special natural features. In some few cases, 
the local legends may be traced to similar peculiarities. 

(1.) The stones called “ Elijah's melons,” on Mount 
Carmel, and “ the Virgin Mary's peas,” near Bethlehem, 
are instances of crystallisation well known in limestone 
formations. They are so called, as being the supposed 
produce of those two plots turned into stone, from the 
refusal of the owners to supply the wants of the prophet 
and the saint. Another celebrated example may be 
noticed in the petrified lentils of the workmen at the 
great Pyramid, as seen by Strabo at its base. 2 In all 
three instances the traces of these 3 once well-known relics 
have now almost entirely disappeared. 

(2.) Another peculiarity of the limestone rock has given 
birth to the legendary scene of the destruction of Senna¬ 
cherib's army. Two pits were formerly pointed out near 
Bethlehem as the grave of the Assyrian host. One still 
remains. It is an irregular opening in the rocky ground, 
exactly similar to those which may be seen by hundreds, 
in the wild limestone district, called the Karst, above 
Trieste. The real scene of the event is probably elsewhere. 4 

(3.) The limestone, which is usually white or grey, is 
occasionally streaked with red. It is in these reddish 
veins that the pilgrims fancied they saw the marks of the 
drops of blood in the so-called Scala-Santa; or on the 
rock near Jerusalem, of late years pointed out as the scene 
of the martyrdom of Stephen. 

(4.) The black and white stones—usually called volcanic 
—found along the shores of the sea of Galilee, have been 

1 See Chapter XIV. the general petrifaction of those which 

2 Strabo, xvii. These petrified len- had supported Pharaoh at the time of 
tils were probably the same as the pe- the Exodus. Weil’s Legends, p, 121, 
trifled fruits said to have been in the 122. 

possession of Omar Ibn Abd-al Aziz, 3 Clarke, v. 182. ‘‘Those on Mount 

Caliph of Egypt, in the 99th year of the Carmel were carried off by Djezzar 
Hejira. In this version of the story, Pasha for cannon-balls.” Clarke, iv. 117. 
they were supposed to be the relics of 4 See Chapter IV. 


Legendary 

curiosities. 





154 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


transformed by Jewish fancy into the traces of the tears 
of Jacob in search of Joseph. 1 

(5.) It is not of the nature of limestone rocks to 
assume fantastic forms, and in this respect the contrast 
between the legends of Palestine and Sinai is most 
apparent. Some few however there are; their very 
slightness indicating that they have not been the occasion, 
but only the handles of the stories appended to them. 
The cavity of the footmark on Mount Olivet; the fissures 
in the rocks “ that were rent,” and the supposed entomb¬ 
ment of Adam’s skull, in Golgotha ; the petrifaction of the 
ass at Bethany; the sinuous mark of the Virgin’s girdle 
by Gethsemane ; the impression of Elijah’s form on the 
rocky bank by the roadside, near the convent of Mar Elias, 
between Bethlehem and Jerusalem, 2 are perhaps the only 
objects in which the form of the rocks can be supposed to 
have suggested the legends. But another place will occur 
for speaking of these more particularly. 3 

It is worth while to enumerate these instances, trifling 
as they are, in order to illustrate the slightness of foun¬ 
dation which the natural features of Palestine afford 
for the mythology, almost inevitably springing out of 
so long a series of remarkable events. And this is in 
fact the final conclusion which is to be drawn from 
the character, or rather want of character, presented 
by the general scenery. If the first feeling be disap¬ 
pointment, yet the second may well be thankfulness. 
There is little in these hills and valleys on which the 
imagination can fasten. Whilst the great seats of Greek 
and Roman religion—at Delphi and Lebadea, by the 
lakes of Alba and of Aricia,—strike even the indif¬ 
ferent traveller as deeply impressive—Shiloh and Bethel 
on the other hand, so long the sanctuaries and oracles 
of God, almost escape the notice even of the zealous 
antiquarian in the maze of undistinguished hills which 
encompass them. The first view of Olivet impresses us 
chiefly by its bare matter-of-fact appearance ; the first 
approach to the hills of Judaea reminds the English 

1 See Sandy s, p. 191. Van Egmont, 

364. 


2 See Quaresmiup, vol. II.; vi. 8. 

3 See Chapter XIV. 


PALESTINE. 


155 


traveller not of the most but of the least striking 
portions of the mountains of his own country. Yet 
all this renders the Holy Land the fitting cradle of a 
religion which expressed itself not through the voices 
of rustling forests, or the clefts of mysterious precipices, 
but through the souls and hearts of men,—which was 
destined to have no home on earth, least of all in its own 
birthplace,—which has attained its full dimensions only in 
proportion as it has travelled further from its original 
source, to the daily life and homes of nations as far removed 
from Palestine in thought and feeling, as they are in 
climate and latitude—which alone, of all religions, claims 
to be founded not on fancy or feeling, but on Fact and 
Truth. 







CHAPTER III. 

- 4 - 

JUDAEA AND JERUSALEM. 

Gen. xlix. 9,11,12. “ Judali is a lion’s whelp : from the prey, my son, 

thou art gone up : he stooped down, he couched as a lion, and as an old 
lion; who shall rouse him up ?—Binding his foal unto the vine, and his 
ass’s colt unto the choice vine; he washed his garments in wine, and his 
clothes in the blood of grapes: his eyes shall be red with wine, and 
his teeth white with milk.” 

Psalm lxxvi. 2. “ In Salem is his ‘ covert,’ and his ‘ lair ’ in Zion.” 


Judjsa :—I. The “south” frontier—Simeon.—II. Mountain country of 
Judah—Lion of Judah—Vineyards—Fenced cities— Bethlehem — 
Capital cities—Hebron—Jerusalem. 

Jerusalem:— I. Exterior aspect. 1. Long obscurity—Jebus—Mountain 
fastness. 2. Ravines of Kedron and Hinnom. 3. Compactness. 
4. Surrounding mountains. 5. Central situation.—II. Interior aspect. 
1. Hills of the city. 2. Temple-mount—Rock of the Sakrah—Spring. 
3. Walls—Palaces—Ruins.—III. Mount of Olives—Slight connection 
with the earlier history — Presence of Christ—Bethany—Scene of 
triumphal entry—Conclusion. 






MAP OF JERUSALEM 





















JUDiEA AND JERUSALEM. 


The southern frontier of Palestine almost imperceptibly 
loses itself in the desert of Sinai. It is sometimes called the 
land of “ Goshen,” 1 or the “ frontier,” doubtless from the 
same reason as the more famous tract between the culti¬ 
vated Egypt and the Arabian desert, in which the Israelites 
dwelt before the Exodus. But it is more commonly 
known as “ the south,” “ the south country.” Abraham 
“ went up out of Egypt into the south ” “ He went on his 
journeys from the south even unto Bethel.” “ Isaac dwelt 
in the south country .” Here, in the wide pastures between 
the hills and the actual Desert, the Patriarchs fed their 
flocks ; here were the wells,— the first regular wells that 
are met by the traveller as he emerges from the wil¬ 
derness—Moladah, Lahai-Roi, and, above all, Beersheba. 2 
The exact limits of this “ southern frontier ” are, of course, 
difficult to be determined. Its main sweep, however, was 
through the vast undulating plain which contains the 
greater part of these wells, immediately under the hills of 
Judaea, now known as the Wady Kibab, probably what in 
former times was called the “ valley,” i. e. the e torrent-bed 5 
or Wady of Gerar. 3 After the Patriarchal times, it has 
but few recollections. It was indeed the first approach of 
the Israelites to their promised home, when the spies 
ascended from Kadesh “ by the south,” 4 but not that by 
which they finally entered. It was then still what it had 

1 Josh. x. 41, xi. 16. Appendix). Numb. xiv. 25; 1 Sam. 

2 Robinson (i. 300) describes two, xv. 5; 1 Chr. iv. 39 (lxx “ Gerar ” for 

Van de Velde (ii. 136) Jive wells. “ Gedor.”) See Chapter I. Part ii. p. 100. 

3 Gen. xxvi. 17, 19, “Nacbal,” (see 4 Numb. xiii. 22. 




The 

“South” 

Frontier. 






100 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


Simeon. 


been in the days of Abraham—a nomadic country, though 
with less illustrious sheykhs ; “ the Amalekites dwelt in 
the land of the south/' 1 and after the occupation of Canaan 
by Joshua, “the children of the Kenite, Moses' father- 
in-law," with a true Bedouin instinct, “went up into 
the wilderness of Judah, which lieth in the south of 
Arad," 2 and between them the country was shared. 
And the latest notices of this region agree with the 
earliest. The Amalekites of the Desert were still there, 
in the reign of Saul, with the Kenites amongst them, 
“ with their sheep, and oxen, and lambs ;" 3 and again, in 
the close of his reign, they broke in once more upon the 
country from which he had driven them, upon “ the south 
of the Cherethites and the south of Caleb, and burned Ziklag 
with fire." 4 Most of the habitable places in these parts are 
called “ Hazer; " that is, they were merely the unwalled 
villages of Bedouins. The names of some indicate that 
they were stations of passage, like those which now are to 
be seen on the great line of Indian transit between Cairo 
and Suez. In “ Beth-marcaboth," “ the house of chariots," 
and “ Hazar-Susim," “the village of horses," we recognise 
the depots and stations for the “ horses " and “ chariots" 
such as those which in Solomon’s time went to and fro 
between Egypt and Palestine. 5 

To Simeon, the fierce and lawless tribe, the dry “south" 
was given, for “out of the portion of Judah was the 
inheritance of the children of Simeon ; for the part of 
the children of Judah was too much for them ; therefore 
the children of Simeon had their inheritance within the 
inheritance of them." 6 In the prophecy of Jacob he is 
“ divided and scatteredin that of Moses he is omitted 
altogether. Amongst these Bedouin villages his lot was 
cast; and as time rolled on, the tribe gradually crossed 
the imperceptible boundary between civilisation and bar¬ 
barism, between Palestine and the Desert; and, in “ the 
days of Hezekiah," they wandered forth to the east to 
seek pasture for their flocks, and “smote the tents" 

1 Numb. xiii. 29 ; xiv. 25. 3 1 Sam. xv. 6, 9. 

2 Judges i. 16. Compare Kinah, 4 1 Sam. xxx. 14. 

Josh. xv. 22; also, for Arad, see Numb. 5 Josh. xix. 5; 1 Kings x. 28. 

xxi. 1; Josh. xii. 14, 6 Joshua xix. 9. 















VI. SOUTH OF PALESTINE. 
































JUD.EA AND JERUSALEM. 


161 


of the pastoral tribes who “ had dwelt there of old ; ” and 
roved along across the Arabah till they arrived at the 
Mount Seir—the range of Petra—and “ smote the rest of 
the Amalekites, and dwelt there unto this day.” 1 

In the midst of this wild frontier ruins still appear 
on the rising grounds as if of ancient cities ; such as may 
have been Arad, the abode of the southernmost Canaanite 
king, and Kirjath-sannah, so called, doubtless, from its 
palm-trees, the lingering traces of the Desert; though also 
known by the appellation of Debir, or Kirjath-sephir, the 
“ city of the Oracle,” or the “ Book.” It was in the 
capture of this fortress that Othniel performed the feat of 
arms which won for him the daughter of Caleb. 2 But the 
speech of Achsah to her father, was the best reason for the 
slight notice of this Desert tract in later times, and is the 
best introduction to the real territory of Judah, on which 
we are now to enter—“ Give me a blessing, for thou hast 
given me a south land; give me also springs of water.” 

The wells of Beersheba were enough for the Patriarchs, 
the Amalekites, and the Kenites, but they were not enough 
for the daughter of Judah, and the house of the mighty 
Caleb. 

II. The “ hill country,”—“the mountain country,” as it is Mountain 
called—of “ Judah ” in earlier, of “ Judaea ” in later times, is ° f 

the part of Palestine which best exemplifies its characteristic 
scenery—the rounded hills, the broad valleys, the scanty 
vegetation, the villages or fortresses—sometimes standing, 
more frequently in ruins—on the hill tops; the wells in 
every valley, the vestiges of terraces, whether for corn or 
wine. Here the “Lion of Judah” entrenched himself, to The Lion 
guard the southern frontier of the Chosen Land, with of Judal) - 
Simeon, Dan, and Benjamin nestled around him. Well 
might he be so named in this wild country, more than half 
a wilderness, the lair of the savage beasts, 3 of which the 
traces gradually disappear as we advance into the interior. 

Fixed there, and never dislodged, except by the ruin of 


1 i Chron. iv. 39 43. usually in or near those mountains—for 

2 Josh. xv. 15 17, 49; Judges i. example,that of Samson, and that of the 

[_Prophet of Bethel, and “the lion and 

3 The “lions” of Scripture occur the bear” of David's shepherd-youth. 


162 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


the whole nation, “he stooped down, he couched as a 
lion, and as an old lion—who shall rouse him up % 99 
Throughout the troubled period of the Judges, from 
Othniel to Samson, Judah dwelt undisturbed within those 
mountain fastnesses. In these gray hills, and in their 
spacious caverns, David hid himself, when he fled to the 
mountains like one of their own native partridges, and, 
with his band of freebooters, maintained himself against 
the whole force of his enemy. The tribes of the east and 
of the north were sw r ept away by the Assyrian kings, 
Galilee and Samaria fell before the Roman conquerors, 
w T hilst Judah still remained erect—the last, because the 
most impregnable, of the tribes of Israel. 

As in the general, so also in the detailed features of 
the country, the character of Judah is to be traced. 
Here, more than elsewhere, are to be seen on the sides 
Vineyards. 0 f the hin s> the vineyards, marked by their watch-towers 
and walls, seated on their ancient terraces—the earliest 
and latest symbol of Judah. The elevation of the hills 
and table-lands of Judah is the true climate of the 
vine, 1 and at Hebron, according to the Jewish tradition, 
was its primeval seat. He “ bound his foal to the vine, 
and his ass' colt unto the choice vine ; he washed his gar¬ 
ments in wine, and his clothes in the blood of grapes." 2 
It was from the Judaean valley of Eshcol—“the torrent of 
the cluster "—that the spies cut down the gigantic cluster 
of grapes. 3 “ A vineyard on ‘ a hill of olives,' " with the 
“ fence," and “ the stones gathered out," and “ the tower 
in the midst of it," 4 is the natural figure which, both in the 
prophetical and evangelical records, represents the king¬ 
dom of Judah. The “ vine " was the emblem of the nation 
on the coins of the Maccabees, and in the colossal cluster 
of golden grapes which overhung the porch of the second 

Compare, too, the frequency of names the leopards/ ) in Lebanon and Anti¬ 
derived from wild beasts in those parts Lebanon, Cant. iv. 8. 

— “ Slmal” — “Shaalbim” (foxe3 and 1 See Humboldt’s “ Asie Centrale,” 
jackals,) Jos. xv. 28, xix. 3, 42 ; Jud. i. iii. pp. 125—136; Cosmos, i. 125—126; 
35; compare also Jud. xv. 4: “Lebaoth” Ritter, iii. p. 220. 

(lionesses), Jos. xv. 32, xix. 6; the 2 Gen. xlix. 11. 

Ravine of Hyenas (Zeboim) 1 Sam. 3 Numb. xiii. 23—24. 

xvii. 18; Valley of Stags (Ajalon), Jud. 4 Isa. v. 1 ; “a very fruitful hill ” is 

i. 35; Josh. xix. 42. They re-appear, “ a horn the son of oil/’ Matt. xxi. 33. 

(“the lions’ dens, and the mountains of See Chapter XIII. 


JUDiEA AND JERUSALEM. 


163 


Temple ; and the grapes of Judah still mark the tomb¬ 
stones of the Hebrew race in the oldest of their European 
cemeteries, at Prague. 

But, further, on these mountain tops were gathered all 
the cities and Tillages of Judah and Benjamin; in this 
respect contrasted, as we shall see, with the situation of 
the towns of the more northern tribes. The position of 
each is so like the other, that it is difficult to distinguish 
them when seen ; useless to characterise them in descrip¬ 
tion. Hence, although when the names are preserved, 
their identification is certain; when the name is lost, as 
in the case of Modin , 1 we must be satisfied with the 
selection of any one of the many heights which, according 
to the description of the monument of the Maccabees, can 
be seen from the sea . 2 The only eminence which stands out 
from the rest, marked by its peculiar conformation, is 
the square-shaped mountain east of Bethlehem, known by 
the name of “ the Frank Mountain,” from the baseless 
story that it was the last refuge of the Crusaders, or “ the 
Hill of the Little Paradise,” (Gebel-el-Fureidis), from its 
vicinity to the gardens of the Wady Urtas . 3 But of this 
the only historical recollection is the fact of its character¬ 
istic selection as the burial-place of Herod the Great. 

Amidst this host of “fenced cities of Judah,” it is 
enough to mention one, not only on account of its sur¬ 
passing interest, but because its very claim to notice is 
founded on the fact that it was but the ordinary type of 
a Judsean village, not distinguished by size or situation 
from any amongst “the thousands of Judah .” 4 All the 
characteristics of Bethlehem are essentially of this nature. 
Its position on the narrow ridge of the long gray hill 
which would leave “ no room ” for the crowded travellers 
to find shelter; the vineyards, kept up along its slopes 
with greater energy, because its present inhabitants are 

1 1 Macc. xiii. 25—30. in earlier times have borne the name 

2 Such a point may be found on any of “ Beth-hac-Cerem ” (the house of the 

of the hills westward of the plateau of vineyard), which is once mentioned 
Jerusalem. Schwarze (96) fixes on one (Jer. vi. 1) as a well-known beacon sta- 
of the name of Midan, near Kustul. tion in Judsea. “ Set up a sign of fire 

3 See Kitto’s Land of Promise, p. 28. in Beth-hac-Cerem.” See Chapter I 
This name slightly confirms the suppo- part ii. 

sition, that for the same reason it may 4 Micah v. 2. 

m 2 


Fenced 
cities of 
Judah. 


Herodion. 


Beth¬ 

lehem. 






164 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


Hebron. 




Christian; the corn-fields below, the scene of Ruth’s 
adventure, and from which it derives its name, “ the house of 
bread the well close by the gate, for whose water David 
longed ; the wild hills eastward, where the flocks of David 
and of “the shepherds abiding with their flocks by night ” 
may have wandered ; all these features are such as it shares 
more or less in common with every village of Judah. 1 

But, as in every country, so in Palestine and Judaea, 
there is a peculiar interest attaching to the situation of its 
capital cities. 

The earliest seat of civilised life, not only of Judah but 
of Palestine, was Hebron. It was the ancient city of 
Ephron the Hittite, in whose “ gate ” he and the elders 
received the offer of Abraham, 2 when as yet no other 
fixed habitation of man was known in Central Palestine. 
It was the first home of Abraham and the Patriarchs; 
their one permanent resting-place when they were gra¬ 
dually exchanging the pastoral for the agricultural life. 3 
It was the city of Arba—the old Canaanite chief, with 
his three giant sons 4 —under whose walls the trembling 
spies stole through the land by the adjacent valley of 
Eshcol. Here Caleb chose his portion, and gave it the 
new name of “ Hebron,” 5 when, at the head of his valiant 
tribe, he drove out the old inhabitants, and called the 
whole surrounding territory after his own name ; 6 and 
there, under David, and at a later period under Absalom, 
the tribe of J udah always rallied when it asserted its inde¬ 
pendent existence against the rest of the Israelite nation. 7 
It needs but few words to give the secret of this early 
selection, of this long continuance, of the metropolitan 
city of Judah. Every traveller from the Desert will have 
been struck by the sight of that green vale, with its 
orchards and vineyards, and numberless wells, and in 
earlier times we must add the grove of terebinths or oaks, 
which then attracted from far the eye of the wandering 
tribes. This fertility was in part owing to its elevation 


1 See Chapter II. part ii. 

8 Gen. xxiii. 10. 

3 Gen. xxxv. 27; xxxvii. 14. 

4 Josh. xv. 13; xxi. 11; Numb, 

xiii. 22, 33. 


5 Judg. i. 10. 

6 1 Sam. xxx. 14. “ Upon the South 
of Caleb.” 

7 2 Sam. ii. 11.; xv. 9—10. 


JCJMA AND JERUSALEM. 


165 


into the cooler and the more watered region, above the 
dry and withered valleys of the rest of Judaea . 1 Com¬ 
manding this fertile valley, rose Hebron on its crested hill. 
Beneath was the burial-place of the founders of their race. 
Caleb must have marked out the spot for his own, when 
w T ith the spies, he had passed through this very valley. 
When David returned from the chase of the Amalekite 
plunderers on the Desert frontier, and doubted “ to which 
of the cities of Judah he should go up” from the wilderness, 
the natural features of the place, as well as the oracle of 
God, answered clearly and distinctly, “ Unto Hebron .” 2 

III. But Hebron was not the permanent capital. The 
metropolis of Judah — of the Jewish monarchy — of 
Palestine—(in one sense) of the whole world—is Jeru¬ 
salem. It will be convenient first to give its general 
aspect expressed as nearly as possible in words written 
from the spot. 

Jerusalem is one of the few places of which the first impression 
is not the best. No doubt the first sight—the first moment 
when from the ridge of hills which divide the valley of Eephaim 
from the valley of Bethlehem one sees the white line crowning the 
horizon, and knows that it is Jerusalem—is a moment never to 
be forgotten. But there is nothing in the view itself to excite your 
feelings. Nor is there even when the Mount of Olives heaves in 
sight, nor when “ the horses' hoofs ring on the stones of the streets 
of Jerusalem /' Nor is there in the surrounding outline of hills on the 
distant horizon. Nebi-Samuel is indeed a high and distinguished 
point, and Bamah and Gibeah both stand out, but they and all the 
rest in some degree partake of that featureless character which 
belongs to all the hills of Judaea, as does Olivet itself. In one 
respect no one need quarrel with this first aspect of Jerusalem. So 
far as localities have any concern with religion, it is well to feel that 
Christianity, even in its first origin, was nurtured in no romantic 
scenery; that the discourses in the walks to and from Bethany, 
and in earlier times the Psalms and Prophecies of David and 
Isaiah, were not as in Greece the offspring of oracular cliffs and 
grottos, but the simple outpouring of souls which thought of 
nothing but God and man. It is not, however, inconsistent with 
this view to add, that though not romantic—though at first sight 
bare and prosaic in the extreme—there does at last grow up about 
Jerusalem a beauty as poetical as that which hangs over Athens 

1 Chapter I. part ii. p. 101. 2 2 Sam. ii. 1. 


Jerusa¬ 

lem. 


Exterior 

aspect. 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


and "Rome. First, it is in the highest degree venerable . Modern 
houses it is true there are; the interiors of the streets are modern ; 
the old city itself (and I felt a constant satisfaction in the thought) 
lies buried twenty, thirty, forty feet below these wretched shops and 
receptacles for Anglo-Oriental conveniences. But still, as you look 
at it from any commanding point, within or without the walls, you 
are struck by the gray ruinous masses of which it is made up; it is 
the ruin, in fact, of the old Jerusalem on which you look,—the 
stones, the columns, the very soil on which you tread, is the accu¬ 
mulation of nearly three thousand years. And as with the city, so it 
is with-the view of the country round it. There is, as I have said, 
no beauty of form or outline, but there is nothing to disturb the 
thought of the hoary age of those ancient hills; and the interest of 
the past, even to the hardest mind, will in spite of themselves invest 

them with a glory of their own. 

But besides this imaginative interest there are real features which 
would, even taken singly, be enough to redeem the dullest of prospects. 
In the first place there is the view of the Moab mountains; I always 
knew that I should see them from Olivet, but I was not prepared for 
their constant intermingling with the views of Jerusalem itself. From 
almost every point, there was visible that long purple wall, rising out 
of its unfathomable depths, to us even more interesting than to the 
old Jebusites or Israelites. They knew the tribes who lived there; 
they had once dwelt there themselves. But to the inhabitants of 
modern Jerusalem, of whom comparatively few have ever visited the 
other side of the Jordan, it is the end of the world,—and to them, 
to us, these mountains almost have the effect of a distant view of the 
sea; the hues constantly changing, this or that precipitous rock 
coming out clear in the morning or evening shade—there, the form 
dimly shadowed out by surrounding valleys of what may possibly be 
Pisgah—here the point of Kerak, the capital of Moab and fortress 
of the Crusaders—and then at times all wrapt in deep haze—the 
mountains overhanging the valley of the shadow of death, and all 
the more striking from their contrast with the gray or green colours 
of the hills and streets and walls through which you catch the 
glimpse of them. Next, there are the ravines of the city. This is 
its great charm. The Dean of St. Paul's once observed to me that 
he thought Luxembourg must be like Jerusalem in situation. And 
so to a certain extent it is. I do not mean that the ravines of 
Jerusalem are so deep and abrupt as those of Luxembourg, but 
there is the same contrast between the baldness of the level 
approach, the walls of the city appearing on the edge of the table¬ 
land, and then the two great ravines of Hinnom and Jehoshaphat 
opening between you and the city; and again, the two lesser ravines, 
rival claimants to the name of Tyropceon, intersecting the city itself. 
In this respect I never saw a town so situated, for here it is not 



JUDiEA AND JERUSALEM. 


167 


merely the fortress, but the city, which is thus surrounded and 
entangled with natural fosses; and this, when seen from the walls, 
especially from the walls on the northern side, and when combined 
with the light and shade of evening, gives the whole place a variety 
of colour and of level fully sufficient to relieve the monotony which 
else it would share with other eastern cities. And, thirdly, it must 
be remembered that there is one approach which is really grand, 
namely, from Jericho and Bethany. It is the approach by which the 
army of Pompey advanced,—the first Western army that ever 
confronted it,—and it is the approach of the Triumphal Entry of 
the Gospels. Probably the first impression of every one coming 
from the north, west, and the south, may be summed up in the simple 
expression used by one of the modern travellers,—“ I am strangely 
affected, but greatly disappointed.” But no human being could 
be disappointed who first saw Jerusalem from the east. 1 The beauty 
consists in this, that you then burst at once on the two great 
ravines which cut the city off from the surrounding table-land, and 
that then only you have a complete view of the Mosque of Omar. 
The other buildings of Jerusalem wdiich emerge from the mass of gray 
ruin and white stones are few, and for the most part unattractive. The 
white mass of the Armenian convent on the south, and the dome of 
the Mosque of David—the Castle, with Herod's tower on the south¬ 
west corner—the two domes, black and white, which surmount the 
Holy Sepulchre and the Basilica of Constantine—the green corn¬ 
field wdiich covers the ruins of the Palace of the Knights of St. John 
—the long yellow mass of the Latin convent at the north-w r est corner, 
and the gray tower of the Mosque of the Dervishes on the traditional 
site of the palace of Herod Antipas, in the north-east corner—these 
are the only objects which break from various points the sloping or 
level lines of the city of the Crusaders and Saracens. But none of 
these is enough to elevate its character. What, however, these fail to 
effect, is in one instant effected by a glance at the Mosque of Omar. 
Prom whatever point that graceful dome with its beautiful precinct 
emerges to view, it at once dignifies the whole city. And when from 
Olivet, or from the Governor's house, or from the north-east wall, 
you see the platform on which it stands, it is a scene hardly to be 
surpassed. A dome graceful as that of St. Peter's, though of 
course on a far smaller scale, rising from an elaborately finished 
circular edifice—this edifice raised on a square marble platform 
rising on the highest ridge of a green slope, which descends from 
it north, south, and east to the w r alls surrounding the whole enclosure 
—platform and enclosure diversified by lesser domes and fountains, 

1 It is this which causes Lieutenant valley, approached it first, as probably 
Lynch’s surprise at the magnificence of no other modern traveller has, from 
his first view. He, coming up from his the east, 
adventui’ous expedition in the Jordan 





168 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


Its long 
obscurity. 


by cypresses, and olives, and planes, and palms—the whole as 
secluded and quiet as the interior of some college or cathedral 
garden—only enlivened by the white figures of veiled women stealing 
like ghosts up and down the green slope—or by the turbaned heads 
bowed low in the various niches for prayer—this is the Mosque of 
Omar: the Haram-es-Sherif, "the noble sanctuary,” the second 
most sacred spot in the Mahometan world,—that is the next after 
Mecca; the second most beautiful mosque,—that is the next after 

Cordova. I for one felt almost disposed to console myself 

for the exclusion by the additional interest which the sight derives 
from the knowledge that no European foot, except by stealth or favour, 
had ever trodden within these precincts since the Crusaders were 
driven out, and that their deep seclusion was as real as it appeared. 
It needed no sight of the daggers of the black Dervishes who stand 
at the gates, to tell you that the Mosque was undisturbed and 
inviolably sacred. 

I. This is, in its main points, the modern aspect of the 
Holy City. Let us take these features in detail, and draw 
from them whatever light they throw on its long history. 

1. It is one of the peculiarities of Jerusalem, that it 
became the capital late in the career of the nation. Rome, 
Athens, Egyptian Thebes; the other ancient centres of 
national life in Palestine itself, Hebron, Bethel, Shechem 
—extend back to the earliest periods of their respective 
history. But in those times Jerusalem was still an 
unknown and heathen fortress in the midst of the land. 
There is something striking in the thought, how many of 
those earlier events took place around it; how often 
Joshua, and Deborah, and Samuel, and Saul, and David 
must have passed and repassed the hills, and gazed on 
the towers of the city, unconscious of the fate reserved for 
her in all subsequent time. “ Thy birth and thy nati¬ 
vity,” such is the language of the bitter retrospect of 
Ezekiel, “ is of the land of Canaan; thy father was an 
Amorite, and thy mother a Hittite; and as for thy 
nativity, in the day thou wast born . . . thou wast not 
salted at all, nor swaddled at all. None eye pitied thee, to 
do any of these unto thee, to have compassion upon thee; 
but thou wast cast out in the open field, to the loathing 
of thy person, in the day that thou wast born.” 1 


Ezek. 2 ?vi. 3, 4, 5. 



JUDjEA AND JERUSALEM. 


169 


Yet the same circumstance, which afterwards con¬ 
tributed to the eminence of Jerusalem, in some degree 
accounts for its long previous obscurity. It was the only 
exception, so far as we know, to the rule, otherwise uni¬ 
versal, that the aboriginal inhabitants of Palestine lingered 
not in the hills, but in the plains. After every other 
part of the mountains of Ephraim and Judah had been 
cleared of its Canaanite population, Jebus still remained 
in the hands of the ancient tribe which probably took 
its name from the dry rock on which their fortress stood. 
And the causes, which for so many centuries preserved 
this remnant of the early inhabitants of the country, were 
in great part the same as those which made it both the 
first object of David’s conquest when he found himself 
seated on the throne at Hebron, and the capital of his 
kingdom for all future generations. 

The situation of Jerusalem is in several respects singular 
amongst the cities of Palestine. Its elevation 1 is remark¬ 
able, occasioned, not from its being on the summit of one 
of the numerous hills of Judaea, like most of the towns and 
villages, but because it is on the edge of one of the highest 
table-lands of the country. 2 Hebron, indeed, is higher still, 
by some hundred feet; and from the south, accordingly, the 
approach to Jerusalem is by a slight descent. But from 
every other side, the ascent is perpetual; and, to the tra¬ 
veller approaching Jerusalem from the west or east, it must 
always have presented the appearance, beyond any other 
capital of the then known world—we may add, beyond any 
important city that has ever existed on the earth—of a 
mountain city ; breathing, as compared with the sultry 
plains of the Jordan or of the coast, a mountain air; 
enthroned, as compared with Jericho or Damascus, Gaza 
or Tyre, on a mountain fastness. In this respect, it 
concentrated in itself the character of the whole country of 
which it was to be the capital—the “ mountain throne,” 
the “ mountain sanctuary,” of God. “The ‘mount’ of 


1 This is given with great liveliness at greater length after the excellent 

and force by Rauwulf, 271. account of it in Robinson’s Researches, 

2 It is needless to describe this pecu- vol. i. pp. 280—383. 
liar aspect of its geographical position 


Jebus. 


Mountain 

Fastness. 


170 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


Ravines of 
the Kedron 
and of 
Hinnom. 


God is as the ‘ mount’ of Bashan ; an high mount as the 
mount of Bashan. Why leap ye so, ye high ‘mountains’ ? 
this is the ‘ mountain 9 which God desireth to dwell in.” 1 
“ Thou hast ascended up on high, thou hast led captivity 
captive.” 2 “ His foundation is in the holy mountains.” 3 

“ They that trust in the Lord shall be as the mount Zion, 
which may not be removed, but standeth fast for ever.” 4 
“ God is in the midst of her, therefore shall she not be 
removed.” 5 It was emphatically the lair of the lion of 
Judah, of “Ariel,” the Lion of God. 6 “In Judah is God 
known ; his name is great in Israel. In Salem is his 
c leafy covert/ and his ‘ rocky den ’ in Zion. 7 . . . Thou 
art more glorious and excellent than the ‘ mountains of the 
robbers/ ” 8 9 And this wild and fastness-like character of 
Jerusalem was concentrated yet again in the fortress, the 
“ stronghold ” of Zion. That point, the highest in the 
city, the towering height 9 which most readily catches 
the eye from every quarter, is emphatically the “ hill-fort,” 
the “ rocky hold ” 10 of Jerusalem—the refuge where first 
the Jebusite, and then the Lion of God, stood at bay 
against the hunters. 

2. This brings us to the second feature which tends to 
account for its early selection or future growth as the 
capital of Palestine. As the traveller advances toward 
Jerusalem, from the west and south, over the featureless 
undulating plain, two deep valleys suddenly disclose them¬ 
selves before us, one on the south, the larger and deeper 
on the north, which then sweeping round the eastern side 
of the city to meet the southern ravine, 11 passes on by still 


1 Ps. lxviii. 15, 16. 2 Ps. lxviii. 18. 

3 Ps. lxxxvii. 1. 

4 Ps. cxxv. 1. 5 Ps. xlvi. 5. 

6 Isa. xxix. 1, 2. 

7 Ps. lxxvi. 1,2. Such seems the full 

expression of the words “sucali” and 

“maonah.” See Appendix. 

8 Ps. lxvi. 4. 

9 This would be equally the case 
whether Zion be the south-western hill 
commonly so called, or the peak now 
levelled on the north of the Temple 
Mount, as is supposed, not without 
considerable grounds, by Mr. Fergusson 
(Essay, p. 55, ff.), and Mr. Thrupp 
(Ancient Jerusalem, p. 17, ff.) 


10 The word “matzad” or“metzod” 
is, like the words in the preceding 
note, taken from the cover into 
which wild beasts are hunted , and was 
used and specially applied to the 
“holds” in the wilderness of Judaea, 
1 Sam. xxiii. 14, 19; 1 Chr. xii. 8, 16 ; 
Jud. vi. 2; Ezek. xxxiii. 27 ; Job xxxix. 
28. It is the usual word for designa¬ 
ting Mount Zion, 2 Sam. v. 7, 9 ; 1 Chr. 
xi. 5, 7, and (in express conjunction 
with Ariel), Isa. xxix. 7. 

11 Josh. xv. 8. In the Mohammedan 
traditions the name of “Gehenna” is 
applied to the Valley of the Kedron. 
Ibn Batuhah, 124. 


JUD.EA AND JERUSALEM. 


171 


narrower clefts through its long descent to the Dead Sea. 
The deepest and darkest of the two defiles was, doubtless, 
for that reason, known as “The Black Valley" (Kedron); 
the other, wider and greener, was “the ravine" (Ge), in 
which probably some ancient hero had encamped,—“ the 
son of Hinnom; " and from the name thus compounded, 
“ Ge-Ben-Hinnom," “ Ge-Hinnom,” was formed the word 
“Gehenna,” which in later times caused what Milton truly 
calls “ the pleasant valley of Hinnom," to become the re¬ 
presentative of the place of future torment. These deep 
ravines, which thus separate Jerusalem from the rocky 
plateau of which it forms a part, are a rare feature in the 
general scenery of the Holy Land. Something of the same 
effect is produced by those vast rents which, under the 
name of “ Tajo," surround or divide Ronda, Alhama, and 
Granada, on the table-lands which crown the summits of 
the Spanish mountains. But in Palestine, Jerusalem stands 
alone, and from this cause derives, in great measure, her 
early strength and subsequent greatness. When David 
appeared under the walls of Jebus, the “ old inhabitants 
of the land," the last remnant of their race that clung to 
their mountain home, exulting in the strength of those 
ancient “ everlasting gates" 1 which no conqueror had 
yet burst open, looked proudly down on the army below, 
and said, “ Except thou take away the blind and the 
lame, thou shalt not come in hither; thinking, David 
cannot come in hither." The blind and the lame, they 
thought, were sufficient to maintain what nature had so 
strongly defended. It was the often repeated story of the 
capture of fortresses through what seemed their strongest, 
and therefore became their weakest, point, “ Prcerupturn, 
edque neglectum ." Such was the fate of Sardis, and of 
Rome, and such was the fate of Jebus. David turned 
to his host below, and said, “ Whoever smiteth the 
Jebusites first, ‘ and dasheth them on the precipice/ .... 
and the lame and the blind that are hated of David's soul, 
he shall be chief and captain." 2 Joab first climbed that 

1 Ps. xxiv. 7. the whole the'safest rendering of the 

2 2 Sam. v. 8 ; 1 Chr. xi. 6. “ Dasheth passage obscurely translated and trans- 
them against the precipice,” seems on posed, “ Getteth up to the gutter.” 



172 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


Compact¬ 

ness. 


Growth. 


steep ascent, and won the chieftainship of David’s hosts; 
and the “ancient everlasting gates” “lifted up their 
heads,” and “ David dwelt in the stronghold of Zion, and 
called it the City of David.” 

3. What these ravines were in determining its earliest 
defences, they have been ever since. It is needless to go 
through the sieges of later times ; but it is obvious 
that the deep depressions which thus secured the city 
must have always been a natural trench, much as 
the Valley of the Jordan, on a larger scale, was to the 
whole country. They acted as its natural defence; 
they also determined its natural boundaries. The city, 
wherever else it spread, could never overleap the 
valley of the Kedron or of Hinnom; and those 
two fosses, so to speak, became accordingly, as in the 
analogous case of the ancient towns of Etruria, the Ne¬ 
cropolis of Jerusalem. This distinction made it again 
doubly impossible for the city of the living to protrude 
itself into the city of the dead; and, as the southern 
ravine had already given a name to the infernal fires of 
the other world, so in Mussulman and Mediaeval tra¬ 
ditions, the Valley of the Kedron was identified with the 
Valley of Jehoshaphat, 1 or of the “Divine Judgment;” and 
long regarded by the pilgrims of both religions as the 
destined scene of the Judgment of the World. The com¬ 
pression between these valleys probably occasioned the 
words of the Psalmist, “Jerusalem is built as a city that 
is at unity in itself.” 2 It is an expression not inapplicable 
even to the modern city, as seen from the east. But it 
was still more appropriate to the original city, if, as seems 
probable, the valley of Tyropceon formed in earlier times 
a fosse within a fosse, shutting in Zion and Moriah into 
one compact mass, not more than half a mile in breadth. 3 

But this compactness and smallness—though in itself a 


1 Joel iii. 2. 

2 Psalm cxxii. 3. 

* This would be still more the case, 
if we could suppose that Zion —the 
original city of David—occupied part 
of what is called Moriah, the oblong 
mass of rock which supports the 


Mosque of Omar, and which must 
have been shut in by the Tyropceon on 
the north, by the ravine of Hinnom 
on the south, and by the Kedron on 
the north and east. (See the Essays of 
Mr. Fergusson and Mr. Thrupp.) 


JUDJ3A AND JERUSALEM. 


173 


fitting characteristic of the capital of that territory which, 
as we have seen, was remarkable for the same reason 
amongst the nations of the then known world—was not 
such as to exclude its future growth. Hemmed in as it 
was on three sides by the ravines, on the western side it 
was comparatively open. A slight depression, indeed, runs 
beneath what is now its wall on that side; still, to speak 
generally, it is joined by its western and north-western 
sides to the large table-land which rises in the midst of 
Judsea, extending from the ridge of St. Elias on the south 
to the ridge of Bireh on the north, from the hills of Gibeon 
on the west to the Mount of Olives on the east. In this 
point, again, its situation is peculiar. Almost all the other 
cities of Palestine were placed, like Hebron, or Samaria, or 
Jezreel, on the crest of some hill, or like Shechem, within 
some narrow valley which admitted of little expansion. 
But Jerusalem had always an outlet on the west and north, 
and though it was not till the latest period of her existence 
that the walls, under Herod Agrippa, were pushed far 
beyond their ancient limits in those directions, yet the 
gardens, and orchards, and suburbs must even in the 
reign of Solomon, have stretched themselves over the 
plain. And this plain was encompassed with a barrier of 
heights, which shut out the view of Jerusalem till within 
a very short distance of the city, and must always have 
acted as a defence to it. 

4. It is probable that these must be the heights alluded 
to in the well-known verse, “As the mountains are round 
about Jerusalem, so is the Lord round about His people/’ 1 
It is true that this image is not realised, as most persons 
familiar with our European scenery would wish and expect 
it to be realised. Jerusalem is not literally shut in by 
mountains, except on the eastern side, where it may be 
said to be enclosed by the arms of Olivet, with its outlying 
ridges on the north-east and south-east. Any one facing 
Jerusalem westward, northward, or southward, will always 
see the city itself on an elevation higher than the hills in 
its immediate neighbourhood, its towers and walls standing 
out against the sky, and not against any high background 


Mountains 
round Jeru¬ 
salem. 


1 Psalm cxxv. 2. 



174 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


Central 

situation. 


such as that which encloses the mountain towns and 
villages of our own Cambrian or Westmoreland valleys. 
Nor, again, is the plain on which it stands enclosed by a 
continuous though distant circle of mountains, like that 
which gives its peculiar charm to Athens and Innspruck. 
The mountains in the neighbourhood of Jerusalem are of 
unequal height, and only in tw r o or three instances—Nebi- 
Samuel, Er-Ram, and Tel-el-Fulil—rising to any con¬ 
siderable elevation. Even Olivet is only a hundred and 
eighty feet above the top of Mount Zion. Still, they act 
as a shelter ; they must be surmounted before the traveller 
can see, or the invader attack, the Holy City ; and the 
distant hue of Moab would always seem to rise as a wall 
against invaders from the remote east. It is these moun¬ 
tains, expressly including those beyond the Jordan, which 
are mentioned as “ standing round about Jerusalem” 
in another and more terrible sense, when, on the night 
of the assault of Jerusalem by the Roman armies, 
they “ echoed back ” the screams of the inhabitants of the 
captured city, and the victorious shouts of the soldiers of 
Titus. 1 The situation of Jerusalem was thus not unlike, on 
a small scale, to that of Rome ; saving the great difference 
that Rome was in a well-watered plain, leading direct to 
the sea, whereas Jerusalem was on a bare table-land, in the 
heart of the country. But each was situated on its own 
cluster of steep hills ; each had room for future expansion 
in the surrounding level; each, too, had its nearer and its 
more remote barriers of protecting hills — Rome its 
Janiculum hard by, and its Apennine and Alban moun¬ 
tains in the distance; Jerusalem, its Olivet hard by, and, 
on the outposts of its plain, Mizpeh, Gibeon, and Ramah, 
and the ridge which divides it from Bethlehem. 

5. This last characteristic of Jerusalem brings us to 
one more feature—namely, its central situation. First, it 
w r as pre-eminently central with regard to the two great 
tribes of the south—which at the time when the choice 
was made by David, were the chief tribes of the whole 

1 crv vt)xzi Be 7] irepa'ia Ka\ ra tt epi£ opt] were not in the mind of Josephus 
(Joseph. Bell. Jud. vi. 5,1). This shows those close at hand, 
that the “ surrounding mountains” 


JUDiEA AND JERUSALEM. 


175 


nation, the only two which contained a royal house—Judah 
and Benjamin. So long as Judah maintained its ground 
alone, Hebron was its natural capital; but from the 
moment that it became the head of the nation, another 
home had to be sought nearer its neighbour, at this time 
its rival tribe. Such a spot exactly was Jebus, or 
Jerusalem. The ancient city, as belonging to the 
aboriginal inhabitants, had been excluded equally from 
the boundaries of either tribe. The limits of Judah 
reached along the plain up to the edge of the valley of 
Hinnom, and then abruptly paused. The limits of Ben¬ 
jamin in like manner crept over Olivet to the same point. 
But the rocky mass on which the Jebusite fortress stood 
was neutral ground, in the very meeting-point of the 
two tribes. From the summit of the Mount of Olives— 
almost from the towers of Zion—could be seen Gibeah, 
the capital of Benjamin, on its conical hill to the north; 
and the distant hills, though not the actual city, of Hebron, 
to the south. 

Yet again Jerusalem was on the ridge, the broadest 
and most strongly marked ridge of the backbone of the 
complicated hills, which extend through the whole country 
from the Desert to the plain of Esdraelon. Every wan¬ 
derer, every conqueror, every traveller, who has trod 
the central route of Palestine from north to south, must 
have passed through the table-land of Jerusalem. It 
was the water-shed between the streams, or rather the 
torrent-beds, which find their way eastward to the Jordan, 
and those which pass westward to the Mediterranean. 
Abraham, as he journeyed from Bethel to Hebron ; Jacob, 
as he wandered on his lonely exile from Beersheba to 
Bethel; the Levite, 1 on his way from Bethlehem to Gibeah ; 
Joshua, as he forced his w r ay from Jericho, and met the 
kings in battle at Gibeon ; the Philistines, as they came up 
from the maritime plain, and pitched in Michmash,—no 
less than Pompey, when, in later times, he came up from 
the Valley of the Jordan, or the Crusaders, when they came 
from Tyre, with the express purpose of attacking Jerusa¬ 
lem,—must all have crossed the territory of Jebus. 


1 Judges xix. 11. 



176 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


Interior of 
Jerusalem. 


Hills of 
the City. 


II. From what may be called the external situation of 
Jerusalem, we pass to its internal relations. And here, 
from perfect certainty, we encounter a mass of topo¬ 
graphical controversy unequalled for its extent, for its 
confusion, and for its bitterness. If the materials, however 
slight, on which our judgment was to be formed were all 
before us, it might be worth while to attempt to unravel the 
entanglement. But the reverse is the case. The data 
exist, perhaps in abundance, but they are inaccessible. 
When Jerusalem can be excavated, we shall be able to 
argue ; till then, the dispute is for the most part as hope¬ 
less as was that concerning the Roman Forum, before 
the discovery of the pedestal of the column of Phocas. 
But without descending into the controverted details, two 
or three broad facts emerge, which may be stated without 
fear of future contradiction. 

1. Whatever may be the adjustment of the names 
of the heights on which Jerusalem stands, the peculiarity 
imparted to its general aspect and to its history by these 
various heights is incontestable. Even in the earlier 
times, when the city was still compact and narrow, there 
are traces of its double form. An upper and a lower 
city,—possibly the dry rock 1 of “Jebus,” or “Zion,” the 
“City of David,” as distinct from the Mountain of the 
Vision (Moriah), in whose centre arose the perennial 
spring, the “ City of Solomon,”—are dimly discerned in the 
first period of Jerusalem. 2 But it was in its latest period 
that this multiplicity of eminences, which it shares, though 
in a smaller compass, with Rome and Constantinople, came 
into play. Then, as now, the broken surface of the slopes 
of Jerusalem arrested the attention both of Tacitus and 
Josephus—“the irregular outline,” the “high hills,” the 
winding of the ascending and descending walls, were 
present to them, as they have been to the lively imagina- 

1 See Ewald’s Geschichte, iii. 155. peace,” may have been first given from 

* It is possible that this double the same vision that originated the 
existence may have given the dual name of “ Moriah,” 2 Chr. iii. 1. Corn- 
form to the name of “Jerusalaim,” pare “in Salem is his ‘covert’—his 
which superseded the old form of ‘den’ in Zion” (Ps. lxxvi. 1.), the 
Jerusalm. It is possible, too, that “ Mount of the daughter of Zion, the 
the name of Jerusalem , “ the vision of hill of Jeru-salem,” Isa. x. 32. 


JUMA AND JERUSALEM. 


177 


tion of the modern poet and historian to whose lot it has 
fallen to describe the last days of the Holy City. 1 But it 
was from more than a mere artistic interest that these 
several points of the broken ground of Jerusalem were so 
carefully recorded. In the earlier sieges—so far as the 
history is concerned—the city might have stood on a 
single eminence, like Ashdod or Samaria. But in the last 
siege by Titus, everything turns on the variety and 
number of posts which the four hills of Jerusalem pre¬ 
sented, not merely to the besieged against the besiegers, 
and to the besiegers against the besieged, but to the 
besieged against each other. If, in its earlier days, in 
its more natural aspect, Jerusalem was the likeness of a 
city that is at unity with itself, in later times its divergent 
summits curiously represent to us the fatal type of the 
house which fell, because it was divided against itself. 

2. Whatever differences have arisen about the other 
hills of Jerusalem, there is no question that the mount on 
which the Mosque of Omar stands, overhanging the 
Valley of the Kedron, has from the time of Solomon, if 
not of David, been regarded as the most sacred ground 
in Jerusalem. And on this hill, whatever may be the 
controversies respecting the apportionment of its several 
parts, or the traces of the various architecture which 
from the time of Solomon downwards have been reared 
on its rocky sides and surface, two natural objects remain, 
each of the highest historical interest. 

High in the centre of the platform rises the remarkable 
rock, now covered by the dome of “the Sakrah.” 2 “It is 
irregular in its form, and measures about sixty feet in one 
direction, and fifty feet in the other. It projects about 
five feet above the marble pavement, and the pavement of 
the mosque is twelve feet above the general level of the 
enclosure, making this rise seventeen feet above the 
ground .... It appears to be the natural surface of 

1 See Milman’s excellent description erase are, “ hemmed in almost on all 
of Jerusalem, both in the third volume sides by still loftier mountains.” 
of the History of the Jews (15—17), 2 1 quote from the only authentic 

and still more strikingly in the first account, that by Mr. Catherwood, given 
volume of the History of Christianity, in Bartlett’s Walks about Jerusalem, 
p. 318. In that description the only pp. 156, 163. 
words which an eye-witness would 


The Temple 
Mount. 


The rock 
of the 
“ Sakrah.’ 


178 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


Mount Moriah; in a few places there are marks of 
chiseling; but its south-east corner is an excavated 
chamber, to which there is a descent by a flight of stone 
steps. This chamber is irregular in form, and its super¬ 
ficial area is about six hundred feet; the average height 
seven feet. In the centre of the rocky cave there is a 
circular slab of marble, which being struck, makes a 
hollow sound, thereby showing that there is a well, or 
excavation, beneath.” 

This mass of rock standing where it does, must always 
have been an unaccountable disfigurement of the Temple 
area. The time for arriving at a positive conclusion 
respecting it is not yet come. But it may be worth while 
to give the various explanations respecting it, fabulous or 
historical, during the successive stages of its known 
history. 1 

(a) . The Christians, before the Mussulman occupation 
of Syria, regarded it as the rock of the Holy of Holies, 
and as such—so different was the feeling of the Christian 
world with regard to the Old Testament between the fifth 
century and our own—used every effort to defile it. 

(b) . Regarded as the site of the Holy of Holies by Caliph 
Omar, it was then by his successors invested with a 
sanctity only less than the Kaaba of Mecca; believed to 
be the rock of Jacob’s pillow at Bethel; the stone of 
prophecy, which would have fled on the extinction of that 
gift, but which was forcibly detained by the angels in 
anticipation of the visit of Mahomet to Jerusalem in his 
nocturnal flight, when it bowed to receive him, and 
retained the impression of his feet as he mounted the 
celestial Borak. Within the cave every prayer is sup¬ 
posed to be granted, and in the well are believed to 
rest the souls of the departed between death and the 
Resurrection. 2 

(c) . Recovered by the Crusaders, it was exhibited as 
the scene of the Apparition of the angel to Zacharias, and 
of the Circumcision of Christ, as also of many other events 

1 It may possibly be the “lapis century. But this must be very 
pertusus” (perforated stone) used as doubtful. 

the Jews’ wailing-place in the fourth 2 The belief was that the living could 


JUDAS A AND JERUSALEM. 


179 


in the Gospel history of His life. The footmark of Mahomet 
was then represented as the trace left, when He went out 
of the Temple to escape the fury of the Jews. 1 

(d). In modern times it has been the centre of the most 
conflicting theories of sacred topography. Mr. Fergusson 2 
(chiefly from architectural arguments) has maintained 
that the dome of the Sakrali is the Church of Constantine, 
and consequently, that the rock beneath is the rock of the 
Holy Sepulchre. Mr. Falconer and Mr. Thrupp suppose 
it to be the rock, or part of the rock, on which stood the 
tower of Antonia. Professor Willis urges its claim to 
be the rock of the threshing-floor of Araunah, selected by 
David, and afterwards continued by Solomon and Zerub- 
babel as the “ unhewn stone ” on which to build the Altar; 
the cave within being the sink described in the Talmud 
as that into which the blood and offal of the sacrifices 
were drained off. Undoubtedly, if the measurements of 
the area would allow of it, this last hypothesis would be 
the most satisfactory, except so far as it fails to produce 
adequate examples, of a rock so high and so rugged used 
for either the purposes of a threshing-floor or an altar. 3 

Meanwhile the rock remains, whatever be its origin, 
the most curious monument of old Jerusalem, and not the 
least so, from the unrivalled variety of associations which 
it has gathered to itself in the vicissitudes of centuries. 

All accounts combine in asserting that the water of 
the two pools of Siloam, as well as that of the many 
fountains of the Mosque of Omar, proceeds from a living- 
spring beneath the Temple-vaults. There was no period 


hold converse with these souls at the 
mouth of the well about any disputed 
matter which lay in the power of the 
dead to solve. It was closed, because a 
mother going to speak to her dead son, 
was so much agitated at the sound of 
his voice from below, that she threw 
herself into the well to join him, and 
disappeared. This was the story related 
to me at Jerusalem. A less pleasing 
version is given by Catlierwood (Bart¬ 
lett’s Walks, 154.) 

1 Ssewulf, p. 40. 

2 For Mr. Fergusson’s argument, see 
Chap. XIV. 

3 One argument which Professor 


Willis has omitted in favour of his 
position may be noticed. In 1 Chr. xxi. 
20, 21, it is said that “Oman and 
his four sons hid themselves,” apparently 
within the threshing-floor, for it is 
added that as David came to Oman, 
“ Oman looked aud went out of the 
threshing-floor.” Possibly it was cus¬ 
tomary to have a cave under the rock 
of the threshing-floor to conceal the 
com—as in the cave of Gideon at 
Ophrah, Jud. vi. 11. A cave also exists in 
connection with what was undoubtedly 
the base of the Samaritan altar on 
Gerizim. (See Chap. V.) 

n 2 


Spring in 
the Temple 
Vaults. 





180 


SINAI AND PALESTINE, 


Build¬ 
ings— 
Walls and 
towers. 


of its history when such a provision would not have been 
important to the Temple for the ablutions of the Jewish, no 
less than of the Mussulman, worship; or to the city, which 
else was dry even to a proverb. It was the treasure of 
Jerusalem—its support through its numerous sieges—the 
“ fons perennis aqua) ” of Tacitus 1 —the source of Milton’s 

“ Brook that flowed 
Hard by the oracle of God.” 

But more than this, it was the image which entered into 
the very heart of the prophetical idea of Jerusalem. 
“ There is a river [a perennial river], the streams 2 whereof 
shall make glad the city of God, the holy place of the 
tabernacle of the Most High.” “All my fresh springs 
shall be in thee.” 3 “ Draw water out of the wells of 

salvation.” 4 In Ezekiel’s vision 5 the thought is expanded 
into a vast cataract flowing out through the Temple-rock 
eastward and westward into the ravines of Hinnom and 
Kedron, till they swell into a mighty river, fertilising the 
desert of the Dead Sea. And with still greater distinct¬ 
ness the thought appears again, and for the last time, in 
the discourse, when in the courts of the Temple, “ In the 
last day, in that great day of the feast” [of Tabernacles], 
Jesus stood and cried, saying, If any man thirst, let him 
come unto me, .... out of his belly shall flow rivers of 
living w r ater.” 6 

3. In every approach to the modern Jerusalem, the 
first and most striking feature—in the approach from the 
south, the only striking feature,—is the long line of walls 
and towers. Most eastern cities are entered gradually. 
Cairo, Damascus, Beyrout, have outstepped the limits of 
their ancient fortifications, and the lesser towns, such as 
Hebron and Nablous, have not that protection. But 
Jerusalem is in the singular position of a city of sufficient 
importance, if not for its size, at least for its dignity, to 
have deserved a circuit of walls, whilst it is, at the same 
time, so exposed to the assaults of the wild villagers and 
still wilder Bedouins of the neighbourhood, that it has 

1 Tac. Hist. v. 12. 4 Isa. xii. 3. 

2 Ps. xlvi. 4. The word “Nahar” 5 Ezek. xlvii.l—5; see Chapter VII. 

excludes the Kedron. 6 John vii. 37, 38. 

3 Ps. Ixxxvii. 7. 


JUDJEA AND JERUSALEM. 

not ventured to pass beyond its fortifications. The same 
terror which has collected the entire population of 
Palestine from isolated houses into villages, 1 has confined 
the population of its capital within the city walls. With 
the exception of the almost savage inhabitants of the 
caves and hovels of Siloam, no ordinary habitation can 
be fixed outside; the town is entirely enclosed, the gates 
locked at night, and the present walls, which date from the 
time of the great Ottoman Sultan, Selim I., conqueror of 
Egypt in the year of the European Reformation, thus 
become an essential feature in every view of the place 
from within or from without. 

This to a certain extent must have been the case always : 
Jerusalem must at all times have been in a state of 
insecurity, too great to allow of any neglect of her 
fortifications. From first to last, History and Poetry is 
always recurring to the mention of her walls and gates and 
towers. “ Walk about Zion—go round about her, tell 
the towers thereof; mark well her bulwarks.” 2 David, 
Solomon, Hezekiah are all concerned in the fortifications 
of the city of the Monarchy. To have raised the walls of 
the city of the Restoration was the chief glory of Nehemiah. 
Herod’s walls and towers, called after the favourites of 
his court and family, were amongst his most celebrated 
works. The Temple itself was a fortress of massive 
foundations and gigantic gateways on every side ; the 
walls great and high, with the gates of precious stone, 
furnished the chief images of the Heavenly Jerusalem 
both in the Old and New Testament; and the idea of the 
“ chief corner-stone,” and of the “ stones ” of the living 
Temple of God, which pervade the Evangelical and 
Apostolical imagery, were suggested, in the first instance, 
by the vast masses of stone which, whether of the date of 
Solomon or Herod, form so imposing a part of the existing 
walls of the ancient Temple-area. But this was not the 
only distinction which set off the outward aspect of;the 
city against the other towns of Palestine. Of these 
the modern walls give, as has been observed, some notion. 
Not so, however, the modern buildings. With the one 


181 


Palaces. 


See Chapter II. pp. 135, 136. 


2 Psalm xlviii. 12, 13. 






182 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


Ruins. 


exception oi the Mosque of Omar, it is difficult to raise up 
to the mind's eye from the ruins of the present Jerusalem 
the magnificent sight which, in the times both of the 
Davidic and the Herodian monarchy, must have pre¬ 
sented itself to any spectator. Other residences of regal 
luxury arose elsewhere,—as we shall see in Shechem and 
Samaria,—but Jerusalem only was a city of palaces. 
Compared with the other villages and towns of Palestine, 
contrasted with the mountain-wilderness of its own imme¬ 
diate neighbourhood, it is always spoken of as a splendid 
and dazzling spectacle. What was the architecture, what 
the colour, what the form of these palaces we know not; 
even the Temple is only to be restored by imperfect 
guesses. But it was this general aspect which excited the 
admiration of Psalmists and prophets—“ Beautiful for 
situation, the joy of the whole earth is Mount Zion f 
“on the sides of the north is the city of the Great 
King f “ God is well known in her palaces “ consider 
her palaces/’ 1 

This was the ancient peculiarity of its appearance. 
The modern peculiarity is still more characteristic. If, as 
we have before observed, Palestine is a land of ruins, still 
more emphatically may it be said that Jerusalem is a city 
of ruins. Here and there a regular street, or a well-built 
European house emerges from the general crash, but the 
general appearance is that of a city which has been burnt 
down in some great conflagration ; 2 and this impression is 
increased to the highest degree when, on penetrating 
below the surface, the very soil on which the city stands 
is found to be composed of ruins of houses, aqueducts, and 
pillars, reaching to a depth of thirty or forty feet below 
the foundations of the present houses. This circum¬ 
stance is important, not only as imparting to the city its 
remarkable form and colour, but also as telling the story 
of its eventful course. The old Jerusalem is buried in 
the overthrow of her seventeen captures. Even if the 
city were to be rebuilt once more, the soil on which its 
new foundations must be laid would bear witness to the 

1 Psalm xlviii. 2, 3, 12. if they had been burnt down many cen* 

2 “The houses of Jerusalem look as turie3 ago.” Richardson, ii. 268. 


JUDiEA AND JERUSALEM. 


183 


faithfulness of the image of her earlier desolation ; “ the 
stones of the sanctuary poured out at the top of every 
street 1 “they have made Jerusalem a heap of stones;” 2 
“not one stone shall be left upon anolher, that shall not 
be thrown down.” 3 

III. It has been already observed that “ the hills which 
stand round about Jerusalem” are for the most part too 
remote to enter into any consideration of the situation or 
internal relations of the city itself. There are none on 
the south nearer than the ridge of St. Elias, none on the 
west nearer than Nebi-Samuel, none on the north nearer 
than Gibeah or Hamah. But on the east the city is imme¬ 
diately enclosed by a long ridge, itself with four distinct 
summits, one outlier starting off to the north, and another 
to the south. This ridge is that known both in the Old 
and the New Testament as the Mount of Olives or of the 
Olive-garden. 4 Its four summits are now distinguished 
by traditional names:—1. The “Galilee,” from the 
supposition that there the Angels stood and said, “Ye 
men of Galilee.” 2. The “Ascension,” covered by the 
village and mosque and church of the Gebel-et-Tur (the 
Arabic name for Olivet, as for all elevated summits,) on the 
supposed scene of that event. 3. The “ Prophets,” from 
the curious catacomb called the “ Prophets’ Tombs” on its 
side. 4. “ The Mount of Offence,” so called from Solomons 
idol-worship. The northern outlier has been in modern 
times usually called “ Scopus ;” the southern, the “ Hill 
of Evil Counsel,” marked from far by the single wind- 
driven tree called the “Tree of Judas.” From every 
roof of the city this long ridge forms a familiar feature-— 
so near, so immediately overhanging the town, that it 
almost seems to be within it. Even in the more distant 
view from the summit of Nebi-Samuel the two are 
so closely intermingled, that it is difficult at first sight 
to part the outline of the village on the top of Olivet from 
the outline of the town and walls of Jerusalem itself. 

The olives and oliveyards, from which it derived its 


The Mount 
op Olives. 


1 Lam. iv. 1. 

2 Ps. lxxix. 1. 

3 Mat. xxiv. 2. 


4 Acts i. 12, tov i\cuwvos, translated 
Olivetum ” in the Vulgate, and hence 
Olivet.” 





184 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


Connection 
witli the 
ancient 
history. 


name, must in earlier times have clothed it far more com¬ 
pletely than at present, where it is only in the deeper and 
more secluded slope leading up to the northernmost sum¬ 
mit that these venerable trees spread into anything like 
a forest. And in those times, as we see from the name 
of Bethany (House of Dates), and from the allusions 
after the Captivity and in the Gospel History, myrtle- 
groves, pines, and palm-trees 1 —all of which have now 
disappeared—must have made it a constant resort for plea¬ 
sure and seclusion. Two gigantic cedars, probably amongst 
the very few in Palestine, stood near its summit, under 
which were four shops where pigeons were sold for puri¬ 
fication. 2 The olive and fig now alone remain; the 
olive, still in more or less abundance, the fig 3 here and 
there on the road-side; but both enough to justify the 
Mussulman's belief, that in the oath in the Koran, “ By 
the olive and the fig," the Almighty swears by His favoured 
city of Jerusalem, with this adjacent mountain. 

So close a proximity at once makes us expect to find the 
history of the Mount of Olives inseparably united with 
the history of the Holy City. To a certain extent this 
was the case. The name by which it is sometimes called 
“ the mountain before (i. e. east of) the city;" or “ the 
mountain" simply, indicates its near position. It was 
their open ground—for pleasure, for worship, for any 
purpose that it might serve; the “Park”—the “Cera- 
micus"—the “ Campus Martins" of Jerusalem. Its green 
slopes, as seen in the early spring, stand out in refreshing 
contrast to the dreary and withered ruins of the city at its 
foot. It was also, from its situation, the bulwark against 
any enemy approaching from the east; the thoroughfare 
of any going or coming in the direction of the great 
Jordan valley. In accordance with this, are the few 
notices we find of it in the older history. The sacrifice 
of the “red heifer,” the only sacrifice which was to be 
performed outside 4 the camp in the wilderness, being by 

1 See Chapter II. These palms 3 It appears probable that Beth- 

were of a peculiar kind, called “Zini,” phage is so called from “phage” 
“ Caphnatha.” (Sukkah, iii. 1; and in “green figs.” Lightfoot, ii. 37. 
Schwarze, pp. 257, 264.) 4 Numb. xix. 2, 3. 

2 Lightfoot, ii. 39. 


JUDiEA AND JERUSALEM. 


185 


analogy excluded from the Temple-courts, was celebrated 
as near as possible to them,—and therefore on the slope of 
Olivet. 1 David, before the Temple was built,—and whilst 
“ high places” were still the recognised scenes of religious 
services,—was wont to “ worship God at the top of the 
Mount.” 2 Solomon, when, in his later years, he tolerated 
or adopted the idolatrous rites of his foreign wives, made 
“ high places ” of the three summits “ on the right-hand, 3 
[that is, on the south side] of the Mount of Corruption.” 4 

With the exception of these general allusions, there is 
but one event in the Old Testament which lends any 
interest to its heights. It was by the ascent of Mount 
Olivet that David went up, on his flight from Jerusalem 
to Mahanaim, at the news of Absalom's revolt. 5 It was 
at the top of the Mount that he met Husliai, and had 
his last view of the rebellious city. 6 It was a little way 
past the top that he encountered Ziba and the asses, 
laden with provisions. It was as he descended the 
rough road on the other side, that “Shimei went along 
on the side 7 of the ‘mountain' over against him, and 
threw stones at him, and cast dust.” 

This mournful procession—affecting as it is, and linked 
with every stage of the ascent and descent,—stands alone 
in the earlier history of the Mount of Olives. Its lasting 
glory belongs not to the Old Dispensation, but to the 
New. Its very barrenness of interest in earlier times 
sets forth the abundance of those associations which it 
derives from the closing scenes of the Sacred History. 
Nothing, perhaps, brings before us more strikingly the 
contrast of Jewish and Christian feeling, the abrupt and 
inharmonious termination of the Jewish dispensation,—if 
it excludes the culminating point of the Gospel History,— 
than to contrast the blank which Olivet presents to the 


1 Mishna, Para, iii. 6. - 

2 2 Sam. xv. 32. 

3 This expression seems to show that 

the ‘Mount of Offence’ was not the 

summit which is now so called on the 

south, but that which is called “ Gali¬ 
lee,” on the north—perhaps that which 
in earlier times had been known as 

Nob, the temporary abode of the 
Tabernacle. 


4 1 Kings xi. 7; 2 Kings xxiii. 13. 
The name of Mashchith, (“ corruption ”) 
which occurs in this last passage is the 
only one by which Olivet is called in 
the Mishna. (Para, pp. 276, 277, 279.) 
It is also so called by Zuallart in the 
fifteenth century, i. p. 38. 

5 2 Sam. xv. 30. 6 2 Sam. xv. 32. 

7 2 Sam. xvi. 13. The word is pro¬ 
perly ‘rib.’ 


Flight of 
David. 


Connection 
with the 
Gospel 
History. 







186 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


Presence of 
Christ. 


Bethany. 


Jewish pilgrims of the middle ages, only dignified by the 
sacrifice of “ the red heifer ; ” and the vision too great for 
words, which it offers to the Christian traveller of all times, 
as the most detailed and the most authentic abiding-place 
of Jesus Christ. By one of those strange coincidences, 
whether accidental or borrowed, which occasionally appear 
in the Rabbinical writings,—it is said in the Mishna, that 
the Shechinah, or Presence of Cod, after having finally 
retired from Jerusalem, “ dwelt ” three years and a half 
on the Mount of Olives, to see whether the Jewish people 
would or would not repent, calling, “ Return to me, 0 my 
sons, and I will return to you;” “Seek ye the Lord while 
He may be found, call upon Him while He is near and 
then, when all was in vain, returned to its own place. 1 
Whether or not this story has a direct allusion to the 
ministrations of Christ, it is a true expression of His 
relation, respectively, to Jerusalem and to Olivet. It is 
useless to seek for traces of His presence in the streets of 
the since ten times captured city. 2 It is impossible not to 
find them in the free space of the Mount of Olives. 

Let us briefly go through the points which occur in the 
Sacred History, of the last days of Christ, during which 
alone He appears for any continuous period in Jerusalem 
and its neighbourhood. From Bethany we must begin. 
A wild mountain-hamlet screened by an intervening ridge 
from the view of the top of Olivet, perched on its broken 
plateau of rock, the last collection of human habitations 
before the desert-hills which reach to Jericho—this is the 
modern village of El-Lazarieh, which derives its name from 
its clustering round the traditional site of the one house 
and grave which give it an undying interest. 3 High in 
the distance are the Percean mountains ; the foreground 
is the deep descent to the Jordan valley. On the further 
side of that dark abyss Martha and Mary knew that 
Christ was abiding when they sent their messenger; up 

1 Reland’s Palestine, p. 337; Liglit- 
foot, ii. p. 40. 

2 For the special traditional localities 
of Jerusalem, see Chap. XIV. 

3 Schwarze (263) endeavours to iden¬ 
tify El-Azarieh with Azal (Zech. xiv. 5), 


and to find Bethany at a spot called by 
the Arabs Beth-hana, near Siloam, on 
the western side of Olivet. His motive, 
though entirely suppressed, is evident. 
But his ai’gument has next to nothing 
on which to rest. 


JUMA AND JERUSALEM. 


187 


that long ascent they had often watched His approach—up 
that long ascent He came when, outside the village, Martha 
and Mary met Him, and the Jews stood round weeping. 

Up that same ascent He came, also, at the beginning of 
the week of His Passion. One night He halted in the village, 
as of old; the village and the Desert were then all alive, 
—as they still are once every year at the Greek Easter,— 
with the crowd of Paschal pilgrims moving to and fro 
between Bethany and Jerusalem. In the morning, He 
set forth on His journey. Three pathways lead, and 
probably always led, from Bethany to Jerusalem ; 1 one, a 
steep footpath over the summit of Mount Olivet; another, 
by a long circuit over its northern shoulder, down the 
valley which parts it from Scopus ; the third, the natural 
continuation of the road by which mounted travellers 
always approach the city from Jericho, over the southern 
shoulder, between the summit which contains the Tombs 
of the Prophets and that called the 4 Mount of Offence/ 
There can be no doubt that this last is the road of the 
Entry of Christ, not only because, as just stated, it is and 
must always have been the usual approach for horsemen 
and for large caravans, such as then were concerned, but 
also because this is the only one of the three approaches 
which meets the requirements of the narrative which 
follows. 

Two vast streams of people met on that day. The one 
poured out 2 from the city, and as they came through 
the gardens 3 whose clusters of palm rose on the south¬ 
eastern corner of Olivet, they cut down the long branches, 


1 Most travellers, I believe, go to 
Bethany by the third, and return by the 
second, and thus miss the precise views 
so important in fixing the localities of 
these events. I went by the first and 
returned by the third; and the result 
will appear as we proceed. See the 
Map on p. 158. 

2 John xii. 12, (8x^ 05 & shOwv els rV 
kopr^v) “ The multitude which came to 
the feast took the branches of the palm- 
trees. (eXafiov to fiaia roov tyoiviKuv). 
.... The multitude also met him (k«1 

VK7jvrri(Teu aur<£). 

3 Mark xi. 8, “ having cut the branches 


(Koipavres) from the gardens” (4k ruv 
ay poor). So read the Vatican and Cam¬ 
bridge MSS., and the Syriac and Coptic 
versions, for 4k twv Serbpoor. ’Aypbs is 
properly “ a cultivated field ” or “ pro¬ 
perty,” such as was found in the neigh¬ 
bourhood of towns. Compare Mark v. 
14, “ the city and the fields ; ” Matt. vi. 
28, “the lilies of the field.” I have 
used the word gardens as the nearest 
approach which our language affords. 
Eastern gardens, it must be remembered, 
are not flower-gardens, nor private gar¬ 
dens, but the orchards, vineyards, and 
fig-enclosures round the town. 


Triumphal 
entry of 
Christ to 
Jerusalem. 








188 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


as was their wont at the Feast of Tabernacles, and moved 
upwards towards Bethany, with loud shouts of welcome. 
From Bethany streamed forth the crowds who had 
assembled there on the previous night, and who came 
testifying 1 to the great event at the sepulchre of Lazarus. 
The road soon loses sight of Bethany. It is now a rough, 
but still broad and well-defined mountain track, winding 
over rock and loose stones ; a steep declivity below on the 
left; the sloping shoulder of Olivet above it on the right; 
fig-trees below and above, here and there growing out of 
the rocky soil. Along the road the multitudes threw 
down the branches which they cut as they went along, or 
spread out a rude matting formed of the palm-branches 
they had already cut as they came out. The larger 
portion—-those, perhaps, who escorted Him from Bethany 
—unwrapped their loose cloaks from their shoulders, 
and stretched them along the rough path, to form a mo¬ 
mentary carpet as He approached . 2 The two streams met 
midway. Half of the vast mass, turning round, preceded, 
the other half followed . 3 Gradually the long procession 
swept up and over the ridge, where first begins “ the 
descent of the Mount of Olives ” towards Jerusalem. At 
this point the first view is caught of the south-eastern 
corner of the city. The Temple and the more northern 
portions are hid by the slope of Olivet on the right; what 
is seen is only Mount Zion, now for the most part a rough 
field, crowned with the Mosque of David and the angle of 
the western w T alls, but then covered with houses to its 


1 “The ‘multitude’ (S oxAos) that 
was with him when he called Lazarus 
from the grave . . . . ‘ was bearing 
record’” ( egapripei ), John xii. 17. 

2 (i <i<he greater part of the multitude’ 
(6 7r\e?crTos ox^-os) ‘strewed their own 
cloaks ’ (ecTTpoooav eoi ncbv ret l/xana) 
in the ‘ road; ’ but others ‘ were cutting 
down ’ branches from the trees, and 
‘were strewing them’ in the ‘ road/ 

(eKoiTTov ... iaTpdvvvov), Matt. xxi. 8. Ob¬ 
serve the difference of the tenses . . . tcl 
l/iaTia, the ‘ abba ’ or ‘ hyke/ the loose 
blanket or cloak worn over the tunic 
or shirt, (xrrau'). A striking instance 
of the practice is mentioned by Robin¬ 
son, ii. 162, when the inhabitants of 


Bethlehem threw their garments under 
the feet of the horses of the English 
Consul of Damascus, whose aid they 
were imploring. The branches (/cA.a5ot) 
cut from the trees as they went, (Matt, 
xxi. 8) are different from the mattings 
(crToifiaSes), Mark xi. 8, which they had 
twisted out of the palm-branches as 
they came, arificcs is usually a mat¬ 
tress ; in Plato’s Rep. ii. 1372, it is a 
mat made of ivy or myrtle. Here, in 
all probability, it was hastily woven of 
palm-branches. 

3 Mark xi. 9. “ Those that were going 
before, and those that were following, 
were shouting,” ol npodyoyrts Kal oi 
aKoAovdowres eKpa^ov. 


JUDiEA AND JERUSALEM. 


189 


base, surmounted by the Castle of Herod, on the supposed 
site of the palace of David, from which that portion of 
Jerusalem, emphatically the “ City of David,” derived its 
name. It was at this precise point, “ as He drew near, at 
the descent of the Mount of Olives,” 1 —(may it not have 
been from the sight thus opening upon them 1)—that the 
shout of triumph burst forth from the multitude, “ Hosanna 
to the Son of David! Blessed is He that cometh in the 
name of the Lord. Blessed is the kingdom that cometh of 
our father David . Hosanna . . . peace . . . glory in the 
highest.” 2 There was a pause as the shout rang through 
the long defile ; and, as the Pharisees who stood by in the 
crowd 3 complained, He pointed to the stones which, 
strewn beneath their feet, would immediately “ cry out” if 
“ these were to hold their peace.” 

Again the procession advanced. The road descends a 
slight declivity, and the glimpse of the city is again with¬ 
drawn behind the intervening ridge of Olivet. A few 
moments, and the path mounts again, it climbs a rugged 
ascent, it reaches a ledge of smooth rock, and in an instant 
the whole city bursts into view. As now the dome of the 
Mosque El-Aksa rises like a ghost from the earth before the 
traveller stands on the ledge, so then must have risen the 
Temple tower; as now the vast enclosure of the Mus¬ 
sulman sanctuary, so then must have spread the Temple 
courts ; as now the gray town on its broken hills, so then 
the magnificent city, with its background—long since 
vanished away—of gardens and suburbs on the western 
plateau behind. Immediately below was the Valley of the 
Kedron, here seen in its greatest depth as it joins the 


1 Luke xix. 37, “as He drew near, 
even now, (^ 877 ), at the descent of the 
Mount of Olives (irpbs rfj Karafiacrei tov 
opovs twv iKaiSov), i.e., at the point 
where the road over the Mount begins 
to descend. This exactly applies to 
such a shoulder of the hill as I have 
described, and is entirely inapplicable 
to the first view/the first “ nearing” 
of the city, on crossing the direct 
summit. The expression would then 
have been “at the top of the mount.” 
—The allusion to the “ City of David ” 


would be appropriate, even if, as has been 
recently conjectured (Thrupp’s Ancient 
Jerusalem, pp. 17—20), the name of 
Zion had at that time received an appli¬ 
cation different from its earlier meaning. 

2 I have ventured to concentrate the 
expressions of Matt. xxi. 9, Mark xi. 9, 
John xii. 13, on the one precise ,point 
described by Luke xix. 37, “ The whole 
multitude began ... to praise God 
with a loud voice.” 

3 Luke xix. 39. “ Some of the Pha¬ 
risees ‘ from the crowd.’ ” 


190 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


Valley of Hinnom, and thus giving full effect to the great 
peculiarity of Jerusalem, seen only on its eastern side—its 
situation as of a city rising out of a deep abyss. It is 
hardly possible to doubt that this rise and turn of the road, 
—this rocky ledge,—was the exact point where the mul¬ 
titude paused again, and “ He, when He beheld the city, 
wept over it.” 

Nowhere else on the Mount of Olives is there a view 
like this. By the two other approaches, above mentioned, 
over the summit, and over the northern shoulder, of the 
hill, the city reveals itself gradually ; there is no partial 
glimpse like that which has been just described as agreeing 
so well with the first outbreak of popular acclamation, still 
less is there any point where, as here, the city and Temple 
would suddenly burst into view, producing the sudden and 
affecting impression described in the Gospel narrative. 
And this precise coincidence is the more remarkable 
because the traditional route of the Triumphal Entry is 
over the summit of Olivet; and the traditional spot of the 
lamentation is at a place half-way down the mountain, to 
which the description is wholly inapplicable, whilst no 
tradition attaches to this, the only road by which a large 
procession could have come ; and this, almost the only 
spot of the Mount of Olives which the Gospel narrative 
fixes with exact certainty, is almost the only unmarked 
spot,—undefiled or unhallowed by mosque or church, chapel 
or tower—left to speak for itself, that here the Lord's feet 
stood, and here His eyes beheld what is still the most 
impressive view which the neighbourhood of Jerusalem 
furnishes,—and the tears rushed forth at the sight. 

After this scene—which, with the one exception of the 
conversation at the Well of Jacob, stands alone in the 
Gospel history for the vividness and precision of its 
localisation—it is hardly worth while to dwell on the spots 
elsewhere pointed out by tradition or probability on the 
rest of the Mountain. They belong, for the most part, to 
the “ Holy Places ” of later pilgrimage, not to the authentic 
illustrations of the Sacred History. It is enough to know 
that to the gardens and olive-yards which then, as now,— 
but probably with greater richness of foliage, and greater 


JUDiEA AND JERUSALEM. 


191 


security of walls and watch-towers,—covered the slopes of 
the hill, He resorted, as His countrymen must always have 
resorted, for retirement and refreshment from the crowded 
streets of the city. On one of the rocky banks of the 
mountain, immediately “ over against the Temple,” He sate 
and saw the sun go down over the city, 1 and foretold its 
final doom. Bethany, on the further side, was the home 
to which He retired ; any of the fig-trees which spring out 
of the rocky soil on either side of the road, might be the 
one which bore no fruit. On the wild uplands which 
immediately overhang the village, He withdrew from 
the eyes of His disciples, in a seclusion which, perhaps, 
could nowhere else be found so near the stir of a mighty 
city—the long ridge of Olivet screening those hills, and 
those hills the village beneath them, from all sound or 
sight of the city behind, the view opening only on the wide 
waste of desert-rocks and ever-descending valleys, into the 
depths of the distant Jordan and its mysterious lake. At 
this point, the last interview took place. “ He led them 
out as far as Bethany and “they returned” probably by 
the direct road, over the summit of Mount Olivet. 2 The 
appropriateness of the real scene presents a singular con¬ 
trast to the inappropriateness of that fixed by a later 
fancy, “ seeking for a sign,” on the broad top of the 
mountain, out of sight of Bethany, and in full sight of 
Jerusalem, and thus in equal contradiction to the letter 
and the spirit of the Gospel narrative. 

These are all the points which can be certainly connected 
with the life of Christ in Jerusalem and its neighbourhood. 


1 Such at least is the probable in¬ 
ference from Luke xxi. 37, that He was 
usually in the Temple for the day¬ 
time, and retired to the mountain in 
the evening. From ,the circumstance 
that the gates of the city are closed at 
sunset, very few travellers have ever 
seen this view of Jerusalem at this most 
impressive moment of the day. The 
only recorded instance is in Bartlett’s 
Jerusalem Revisited, p. 115. “ Beautiful 
as this view was in the morning, it was 
far more striking when the sun about to 
sink in the west cast a rich slanting 
glow along the level grassy area, and 


marble platform of the Temple enclo¬ 
sure, touching with gold the edge of 
the Dome of the Rock, and the light 
arabesque fountains with which the 
area is studded; while the eastern 
walls and the deep valley below are 
thrown into a deep and solemn shadow 
creeping, as the orb sinks lower, 
further and further towards the sum¬ 
mit (of Olivet), irradiated with one 
parting gleam of roseate light, after 
all below was sunk in obscurity.” 

2 Luke xxiv. 50; Acts i. 12. See 
Chapter XIV. 


The Last 
Prophecy. 


The Ascen¬ 
sion. 






192 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


Conclu¬ 

sion. 


Yet, perhaps, there is a general impression left by the 
whole, more instructive than any detail. 

At the sight of Delphi, there is one thought which 
rises even above the deep solemnity of the spot, and that is 
the sense of its vacancy and desertion. The scene seemed, 
as I saw it many years ago, to be the exact echo of 
Milton’s noble lines— 

“ The oracles are dumb, 

No voice or hideous hum 
Runs thro’ the arched roof in words deceiving : 

Apollo from his shrine 
Can no more divine, 

With hollow shriek the steep of Delphos leaving.” 

Something akin to this feeling is that which is finally 
left on the mind after exploring the neighbourhood of Jeru¬ 
salem. At first, there cannot but be something of a shock 
in seeing before our eyes and under our feet places in com¬ 
parison with whose sanctity the High Altar of St. Peter’s 
would seem profane. Yet gradually this thought dissolves, 
and another comes in its place. These localities have, 
indeed, no real connection with Him. It is true that they 
bring the scene vividly before us—that, in many instances, 
as we shall see hereafter, they illustrate His words and 
works in detail. But the more we gaze at them, the more 
do we feel that this interest and instruction are secondary, 
not primary : their value is imaginative and historical, not 
religious. The desolation and degradation, which have so 
often left on those who visit Jerusalem the impression of 
an accursed city, read in this sense a true lesson : —“ He 
is not here : He is risen.” 


CHAPTER IV, 


THE HEIGHTS AND THE PASSES OF BENJAMIN. 


Joshua xviii. 11—13. “And the lot of the tribe of the children of 
Benjamin came up according to their families : and the coast of their 
lot came forth between the children of Judah and the children of 
Joseph.—And their border on the north side was from Jordan; and the 
border went up to the side of Jericho on the north side, and went up 
through the mountains westward; and the goings out thereof were 
at the wilderness of Beth-aven.—And the border went over from thence 
toward Luz, to the side of Luz, which is Beth-el, southward; and the 
border descended to Ataroth-adar, near the hill that lieth on the south 
side of the nether Beth-horon.” 


o 




Benjamin, the frontier tribe—Its independence.—I. The Passes. 1. The 
Eastern Passes, (a.) Battle of Ai. (6.) Battle of Michmash. (c.) 
Advance of Sennacherib. 2. The Western Passes—Battles of Beth- 
horon—Joshua—Maccabseus — Cestius.—II. The Heights. 1. Nebi- 
- Samuel or Gibeon. 2. Bethel—Abraham—Jacob—Jeroboam—Josiah. 
Note on Hamah and Mizpeh. 

[In this Chapter, as in the 7th, 9th, and 11th, I have, in consideration 
of the subject, thought it advisable to interweave the History with the 
Topography to a greater extent than would be otherwise justified.] 





THE HEIGHTS AND THE PASSES OF 
BENJAMIN. 


J erusalem, as we have seen, was on the very outskirts 
of Judah, only excluded from the territory of Benjamin 
by the circumstance, that at the division of the land by 
Joshua, Jebus was not yet conquered. Indeed, in the 
blessing on Benjamin it would appear to be reckoned as 
his portion. “ The beloved of the Lord shall dwell in 
safety, and the 1 ‘ Most High 9 shall cover him all the day 
long, and he shall dwell between his shoulders,”—that is 
between the rocky sides of Jerusalem. The southern 
frontier of Benjamin ran through the ravine of Hinnom, 
and it is evidently on them that the charge of extermi¬ 
nating the Jebusites was thought to have rested :—“ The 
children of Benjamin did not drive out the Jebusites that 
inhabited Jerusalem, but the Jebusites dwell with the 
children of Benjamin to this day.” 2 

This peculiar relation to Jerusalem may be traced 
in the whole history of Benjamin. It was the frontier 
tribe, and covered the debateable ground between the 
great rival families, and afterwards kingdoms, of Judah 
and Ephraim. Alternately it seems to have followed the 
fortunes of each. In earlier times it certainly clung to the 
kindred tribes of Joseph, with which it had been asso¬ 
ciated in the passage through the wilderness. 3 It took its 
place with Ephraim and Manasseh in the gathering of the 


1 Deut. xxxiii. 12. The translation 
here given seems the most probable. 
The word translated “shoulder” is the 
same that is usually employed (like our 
English word) for the “ side ” of a hill, 


and is so used of this very situation in 
Josh, xviii. 16, “ The shoulder of the 
Jebusite.” See Appendix; Cataph. 

2 Judges i. 21. 

3 Numb. ii. 18—24. 

o 2 


Benjamin, 
the frontier 
tribe of 
Judah and 
Ephraim. 






196 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


tribes under Deborah and Barak. 1 The bitterest enemies 
of the house of David—Saul, Shimei, and Sheba—were 
Benjamites. It is expressly included under the house 
of Joseph, both at the beginning of the national disrup¬ 
tion as well as during its continuance. 2 Two of its most 
important towns, Bethel and Jericho, were within the 
territory of the northern kingdom. On the other hand, 
besides the fact that Jerusalem belonged to Judah, there 
must have been a portion at least which remained faithful 
to the house of David, in order to justify the expression, 
that Rehoboam “assembled all the house of Judah and 
the tribe of Benjamin" 3 to fight against Jeroboam; 
Hamah, though once occupied by the kings of Samaria, 4 
seems to have been more generally included within the 
limits of Judah; and, finally, after the return from the 
Captivity, the chiefs of Judah and Benjamin always 
appear together at the head of the restored people. 5 

Small as the tribe was, this ambiguous situation gave 
it considerable importance—an importance which was in¬ 
creased by a further peculiarity of the Benjamite territory. 
Of all the tribes of Israel, none, except perhaps Manasseh, 
contained such important passes of communication into 
the adjacent plains —none possessed such conspicuous 
heights, whether for defence or for “high places" of 
indepen- worship. These advantages in the hands of a hardy 
of the P tribe. and warlike tribe ensured an independence to Benjamin, 
which the Hebrew records constantly contrast with its 
numerical feebleness and limited territory.—“ Little 
Benjamin their ruler," “ Am not I a Benjamite, of the 
smallest of the tribes of Israel %" 6 In his mountain- 
passes—the ancient haunt of beasts of prey, 7 Benjamin 
“ ravined as a wolf in the morning," descended into the 
rich plains of Philistia on the one side, and of the Jordan 
on the other, and “ returned in the evening to divide the 


1 Judges v. 14. 

2 2 Sam. ii. 9. Ps. lxxx. 2. See 


7 Here was the “ ravine of Zeboim,” 
or hyenas, (1 Sam. xiii. 18) and “the 
house of Shual,” or of the fox. The 
wolf is either the same as the hyena, 
the Hebrew word being almost identical 
—or else has been extirpated. 


Hengstenberg ad loc. 

3 1 Kings xii. 21. 

4 1 Kings xv. 17—22. 

5 Ezra i. 5 ; iv. 1; x. 9. 

6 Ps. lxviii. 27; 1 Sam. ix. 21. 


THE HEIGHTS AND THE PASSES OE BENJAMIN. 


197 


spoil/' 1 In the troubled period of the Judges, the tribe of 
Benjamin maintained a struggle, unaided, and for some 
time with success, against the whole of the rest of the 
nation. 2 And to the latest times they never could forget 
that they had given birth to the first king. Even down 
to the times of the New Testament, the name of Saul was 
still preserved in their families ; and when a far greater of 
that name appealed to his descent, or to the past history 
of his nation, a glow of satisfaction is visible in the 
marked emphasis with which he alludes to the “ stock of 
Israel, the tribe of Benjamin/' 3 and to God's gift of “ Saul, 
the son of Kish, a man of the tribe of Benjamin." 4 

I. Let us examine this peculiarity of position in detail, so 
far as it elucidates the events which have occurred on the 
territory of this illustrious tribe. 1 have already said that 
the table-land on which Jerusalem is situated extends for 
some miles into the heart of the territory of Benjamin. 
Along this water-shed, the direct road from Jerusalem to 
the north is now and must always have been carried. 
But it is not on this ridge itself that the Passes of 
Benjamin occur. They run, like all the valleys which 
deserve this name, in southern and central Palestine, not 
from north to south, but from east to west, or west to 
east—often, as Dr. Robinson observes, overlapping each 
other's heads in the centre of the table-land from which 
they take their departure. 5 

From the Valley of the Jordan, accordingly, on one hand, 
and from the Maritime Plain, on the other, two main 
ascents may be selected, in which almost all the important 
military operations of central Palestine are concentrated. 

1. Jericho was the key of the eastern pass. From this 
point, the most direct, and without doubt the ancient 
! road, into the interior of the country, was through the deep 
ravine, now called the Wady Kelt, which, after receiving the 

1 Gen. xlix. 27. 

2 Judges xx., xxi. 3 Pliil. iii. 5. 

4 Acts xiii. 21. Gischala,—which 

Jerome asserts (in contradiction to the 

Apostle’s own statement) to be the 
birth-place of the Apostle, but which 
j may possibly have been that of his 
I parents,—is said to be near Ramah. 


6 This tract has been but very im¬ 
perfectly explored. Dr. Robinson’s 
account which is here followed was 
taken from his guides. All that he 
saw, and all that we saw, was the first 
beginning of the pass in the W&dy Su- 
vveinit and its termination in the W&dy 
Kelt. (See Robinson, vol. ii. 116, 307•) 


The 

Passes of 
Benjamin. 


The 

Eastern 

Passes. 






198 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


Battle 
of Ai. 


Wady Fowar, runs ultimately through a deep chasm into 
the WMy Suweinit, and then climbs into the heart of the 
mountains of Benjamin, till it meets the central ridge of 
the country at Bethel. Indefinite as this description, in 
our imperfect state of information, must necessarily be, it 
agrees well with all the ancient notices of the communi¬ 
cation between Jericho and the interior, in the Old 
Testament. At the Christian era it was apparently 
superseded by the present road by Bethany to Jerusalem, 
of which I shall speak hereafter. 1 

(a.) The first great ascent was that of Joshua. Jericho 
had been taken ; and the next step was to penetrate into 
the hills above. It was a critical moment, for it was exactly 
at the similar stage of their approach to Palestine from 
the south, that the Israelites had met with the severe 
repulse at Hormah, which had driven them back into the 
desert for forty years. “Joshua,” accordingly, “sent 
men from Jericho to Ai, which is beside Bethaven, on the 
east side of Bethel, and spake unto them, saying, Go up 
and view the country.” 2 The precise position of Ai is 
unknown; but this indication points out its probable site 
in the wild entanglement of hill and valley at the head of 
the Wady Suweinit. The two attempts of the Israelites 
that followed upon the report of the spies, are quite in 
accordance with the natural features of the pass. In the 
first attempt, the inhabitants of Ai, taking advantage 
of their strong position on the heights, drove the 
invaders “ from before the gate,” 3 . . . . and smote 
them in “ the going down ” of the steep descent. In the 
second attempt, after the Israelites had been reassured 
by the execution of Achan “in the valley of Achor,”— 
probably one of the valleys opening into the Ghor—the 
attack was conducted on different principles. An ambush 
was placed by night high up in the WMy Suweinit, 
between Ai and Bethel. Joshua himself took up his 

1 See Chapters VII. and XIII. “ even to the breakings,” “ the fissures ” 

2 Joshua vii. 2. at the opening of the passes ? as in Isa. 

3 “ Even unto (the) Shebarim.” Ge- xxx. 12, 14, lxv. 14; Lev. xxi. 19, 
senius makes this “ even to destruc- xxiv. 20 ; Ps. lx. 2. (Thus Zunz ad loc. 
tion,” as in Lam. ii. 11, iii. 47; Prov. “bis zu den Biiichen.”) The lxx 
xvi. 18; Isa. i. 28. May it not be omits the words. 


THE HEIGHTS AND THE PASSES OF BENJAMIN. 


199 


position on tlie north side of “the ravine,” apparently 
the deep chasm through which the W&dy Suweinit, as 
before described, descends to the Wady Kelt . 1 From this 
point the army descended into the valley, Joshua himself, 
it would seem, remaining on the heights ; —and, decoyed by 
them, the King of Ai with his forces pursued them as before 
into the “desert ” 2 valley of the Jordan; whilst the ambush, 
at the signal of Joshua’s uplifted spear, rushed down on 
the city ; and then amidst the mingled attack at the head 
of the pass from behind, and the return of the main body 
from the desert of the Jordan, the whole population of Ai 
was destroyed, and a heap of ruins on its site, with a 
huge cairn over the grave of its last king, remained long 
afterwards as the sole memorials of the destroyed city . 3 

( b .) The next time that the pass of Ai appears is in a 
situation of events almost exactly reversed. The lowest 
depression which the Israelite state ever reached before 
the Captivity, was in the disastrous period during the 
first struggles of the monarchy, when the Philistines, after 
the great victory over the sons of Eli, became the virtual 
masters of the country; and not content with defending 
their own rich plain, ascended the passes from the west , 4 
—and pitched in the heart of the mountains of Benjamin, 
in “Michmash, eastward from Bethaven.” The designation 
of the site of Michmash is so similar to that which is used 
to describe Ai as inevitably to suggest the conjecture that 


1 Jos. viii. 11. The use of the article 
and the word ge (ravine) identifies 
the scene. There is some uncertainty 
thrown over this part of the battle by 
the variations of the lxx, who read the 
11th, 12th and 13th verses as follows : 
“ And all the people of war that were 
with him went up, and in their march 
came before the city on the east, and 
the ambush (before) the city on the 
west.” 

2 Both words are used for the same 
region, “the plain” (Arabah), viii. 14, 
“the wilderness” (midbar), 15, 20, 24. 

3 Jos. viii. 28, 29. Two words are 
used in these two places, Tel and Gal, 
the fii st indicating the ruin of the city 
itself, the other, the cairn over the 

king’s grave. It would almost seem 
from the stress laid on the ruins, and 


from the disappearance of the name 
from this time forward, as if “Ai ” (or, 
more strictly, Ha-ai, the ruins) was a 
later name to indicate its fall. 

4 1 Sam. Xiii. 5. The Philistines ga¬ 
thered themselves together to fight 
with Israel—“thirty thousand cha¬ 
riots, and six thousand horsemen, and 
people as the sand upon the sea-shore 
in multitude, and they came up and 
pitched in Michmash.” This is one of 
the places where it is difficult not to 
imagine that the numbers in the 
text are overstated. It should be 
observed, that the gathering of the cha¬ 
riots and horsemen may, and indeed 
must, be understood to be on the 
Philistian plain, before the ascent of the 
mountain-passes. 


Battle 
of Mich¬ 
mash. 


200 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


it was the successor, if not to its actual site, at least to its 
general position; and this agrees with the identification of 
the two in the conflicting traditions of the inhabitants of 
the modern village, by whose name (Mukmas) the ancient 
Michmash is now represented . 1 Before the face of this 
terrible visitation, the people fled in all directions. Some 
even took refuge beyond the Jordan. Most were sheltered 
in those hiding-places which all parts of Palestine, but 
especially the broken ridges of this neighbourhood, abun¬ 
dantly afford. The rocks are perforated in every direction 
with “caves/’ and “holes,” and “pits,” 2 —crevices and 
fissures sunk deep in the rocky soil, such as those in which 
the Israelites are described as concealing themselves. The 
name of Michmash (“ hidden treasure ” 3 ) seems to be de¬ 
rived from this natural peculiarity. Saul himself remained 
on the verge of his kingdom, in the vale of the Jordan, at 
Gilgal. East, and west, and north, through the three 
vallej^s which radiate from the uplands of Michmash—to 
Ophrah on the north, through the pass of Beth-horon 
on the west, and down ‘ the ravine of the hyenas/ 
“toward the wilderness of the Jordan on the east,”—the 
spoilers went forth out of the camp of the Philistines . 4 

At last the spirit of the people revived. On the top of 
one of those conical hills which have been remarked as cha¬ 
racteristic of the Benjamite territory, in his native Gibeah, 
Saul ventured to entrench himself with Samuel and 
Ahiah ; 5 where Jonathan had already been at the time 


1 The peasants of Mukmas told us 
that the old name of their village was 
Medinet-Ckai, adding “that the present 
name had been given about seventy- 
years ago, and that it was called 
Mukmas by the Arabs, and Media et- 
Chai by the Jews.” This statement in 
detail is clearly valueless; but it may 
serve to explain the description of 
Medinet-Chai by Krafft. (See Ritter, 
Jordan, pp. 525—527, and compare 
Schwarze, p. 84.) This view is attacked by 
Robinson in the Bibliotheca Sacra, vol. v. 
p. 93, No. xvii. 1848. Van de Velde and 
Williams (ii. 878) fix the site of Ai at 
Tel-el-Hajar, “ the Mount of Stones,” a 
little to the north of Michmash. In this 
case the ravine which is spoken of north 


of Ai must be, not the Wady Suweinit, 
but that marked in Robinson’s map as 
Wady El-Muogede. These valleys are 
so similar in character that the general 
descriptions of the battle given in the 
text would apply almost equally to both. 
The name Telel-Hajar certainly agrees 
well with the curse on Ai, Tel being 
the same word .used to express “the 
heap,” which was to take the place of 
the city, and the “ Hajar,” or mound 
of stones, corresponding to the cairn 
over the dead king. 

2 1 Sam. xiii. 6, xiv. 11. 

3 From “ Camas," “ laid up in store,” 
i. e. hidden. Deut. xxxii. 34. 

4 1 Sam. xiii. 17, 18. 

5 1 Sam. xiii. 16, xiv. 2,18. 


THE HEIGHTS AND THE PASSES OF BENJAMIN. 


20 ] 


when his father was driven from his previous post at 
Michmash by the Philistine inroad . 1 From this point 
to the enemy’s camp was about three miles, and between 
them lay the deep gorge of the Wady Smveinit, here 
called “ the passage of Michmash/’ which is described as 
running between two jagged points, or “teeth of the cliff /’ 2 
as the Hebrew idiom expressively calls them ; the one 
called the “Shining” (Bozez), probably from some such 
appearance in the chalky cliff; the other, “.the Thorn,” 
(Seneh), probably from some solitary acacia on its top . 3 
Immediately above, the garrison of the Philistines would 
seem to have been situated. It was up the steep sides of 
this ravine that Jonathan and his armour-bearer made their 
adventurous approach, and, aided by the sudden panic, 
and by the simultaneous terror of the shock of an earth¬ 
quake, the two heroes succeeded in dispersing the whole 
host. From every quarter the Hebrews took advantage 
of their enemies. From the top of Gibeah, the watchmen 
saw, and the King and the High-priest heard , 4 the signs 
of the wild confusion. In the camp of the Philistines 
the Israelite deserters turned against them. From the 
mountains of Ephraim on the north, the Israelites, who 
had hid themselves, “ followed hard after them in the 
battle .” 5 “ So the Lord saved Israel that day, and the 
battle passed over to Bethaven ” 6 (that is, Bethel). It 
passed over to the central ridge of Palestine ; it passed 
through the forest, now destroyed, where, from the 
droppings of the wild honey on the ground, the fainting 


1 1 Sam. xiii. 16. 

2 The same expression is used for an 
eagle’s eyrie. (Job xxxix. 28.) These 
jagged points I could not make out. 
Dr. Robinson dwells upon them in 
both his tours. 

3 1 Sam. xiv. 4. Seneh = Acacia. 
See Chap. I. p. 21. 

4 1 Sam. xiv. 16, 19. In the Hebrew 
text and the English version we read 
that “ Saul said, ‘ Bring hither the ark 

of God,’ for the ark of God was at 
that time with the children of Israel.” 

(1 Sam. xiv. 18.) To this statement 
it has justly been objected that it is 
hardly possible that the ark should 
have been at Gibeah, against the natural 
inferences from the whole course of 


the previous and subsequent history, 
that it never left Kirjath-Jearim till 
its final entrance into Jerusalem under 
David. There can be no doubt that 
the lxx has here preserved the right 
reading, from which the present text 
is (in the original) only a slight 
variation—“ Ephod,” i. e., the priestly 
cape, dressed in which the High 
Priest delivered the oracle. That this 
should be on the spot is natural, not 
only from the presence of Ahiah him¬ 
self, but from the nearness of Nob, 
the sacred city, where the Tabernacle 
was at this time situated. 

5 1 Sam. xiv. 21, 22. 

6 1 Sam. xiv. 23. 





202 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


Advance of 
Senna¬ 
cherib by 
the pass of 
Michmash. 


warrior refreshed his parched lips ; 1 it passed over to the 
other side, from the eastern pass of Michmash to the 
western pass of Aijalon, through which they fled into their 
plains ; “ and the people smote the Philistines. 55 2 Then 
Saul “went up 55 3 4 again into his native hills, “and the 
Philistines went to their own place ; 355 and from that day 
till the fatal rout of Gilboa, Israel was secure. 

(c.) There is yet one more passage of sacred poetry, if 
not of sacred history, which brings shortly before us the 
importance of the pass of Michmash. In the magnificent 
description of the advance of Sennacherib upon Jerusalem, 
contained in the 10th chapter of the Prophecies of Isaiah, 
every step of his approach is represented, in order to 
give greater force to the sudden check which is in store 
for him. Whether he actually entered Judaea by this 
road, or, as might perhaps be inferred, from the mention 
of Lachish, as the point from which he eventually came 
up by Esdraelon and the Maritime Plain, the selection 
of this route by the prophet shows that this was the 
ordinary approach. “ He is come to Aiath, he is passed to 
‘the precipice; 5 at Michmash he hath laid up his ‘baggage. 5 
They are gone over the passage ; they have taken up 
their lodging at Geba. 55 4 This is the first day of the 
advance of the enemy. The great ravine is surmounted 
—they are encamped in the heart of the land ; and the 
next morning dawns upon a terror-stricken neighbourhood. 
“ Pam ah is afraid ; Gibeah of Saul is fled. Lift up thy 
voice, 0 daughter of Gallim : cause it to be heard unto 
Laish, 0 poor Anathoth. Madmenah is removed ; the 
inhabitants of Gebim gather themselves to flee. As yet 
shall he remain at Nob that day. 55 It is a short march of 


1 1 Sam. xiv. 25, 26. Compare 2 
Kings, ii. 24, Chap. VII. 

2 1 Sam. xiv. 31. 

3 1 Sam. xiv. 46. 

4 In the interpretation of verse 28, 
much would depend on a more certain 
knowledge of the ground than we yet 
possess. But it seems most probable 
that the whole verse is an accumulation 

of expressions for the one event of the 
passage of the ravine of Michmash. If 
Ai was south, not north of the ravine, 
“ Aiath ” must be taken for a general 


indication of the whole locality. In 
confirmation of this, the lxx reads, 
“ he shall come to Ai,” both before and 
after the mention of the passage of 
Michmash. If, however, Tel-el-Hajar 
occupies the site of Ai, then the 
received text may safely stand. 
“ Migron ” (v. 28) cannot be the place 
mentioned in 1 Sam. xiv. 2, near 
Gibeah—and had therefore best be 
taken in its general meaning of “ pre¬ 
cipice.” (See Gesenius in voce.) 


THE HEIGHTS AND THE PASSES OF BENJAMIN. 


203 


about seven miles ; but it has been long enough to scatter 
right and left the population of all the most famous cities 
and villages of Benjamin ; and the evening finds him at 
Nob, apparently the sacred place, already mentioned, on 
the north-eastern corner of Olivet, actually within sight of 
the Holy City. “ He shall shake his hand against the 
mount of the daughter of Zion, the hill of Jerusalem.” 
But this is the end. “ Behold, the Lord, the Lord of 
hosts, shall lop the bough with terror, .... and he shall 
cut down the thickets of the forest with iron, and Lebanon 
shall fall by a mighty one. And,” in the place of that 
proud cedar, “ there shall come forth a rod out of the 
stem of Jesse, and a Branch shall grow out of his roots.” 1 

2. From the eastern we now turn to the western passes 
of Benjamin, in Beth-horon. Indeed, the incidents of the 
one almost involve the incidents of the other. “ From 
Michmash to Aijalon” was the necessary result of a victory 
which drove the enemy straight across the country. 

The character of the descent from the hill-country of 
Judaea into the plain of Philistia, is very different from 
that of the precipitous ravines which lead down into 
the great depression of the Jordan. The usual route 
of modern travellers from the western plain, is a gradual 
ascent through the rounded hills, and deep, though not 
abrupt valleys, which, beginning at the ancient fortress, 
now called the “ Castle of the Penitent Thief,” (Cas- 
tellum Boni Latronis, corrupted into “Ladroon,”) con¬ 
tinues till it emerges on the open table-land of Jerusalem; 
and it is probably somewhere in this road, or its adjacent 
valleys, that we are to look for the scenes of the return 
of the Ark from the Philistines to Kirjath-jearim, and 
the valley of the ‘ Terebinth/ 2 in which their great rout 
took place, on David's victory over Goliath. But this 


1 Isaiah x. 28 -34 ; xi. 1. The 
scene of the destruction of Sen¬ 
nacherib’s army cannot be fixed with 
certainty. But it was probably in his 
return through the western pass (de¬ 
scribed in the next pages), that 
his advance was arrested. He was 
coming from Libnah in the Philistine 
plain,—this, in all probability, is the 
modern Blanche-Garde (see Chapter 
VI.),—which, as it was the first city 


attacked by Joshua on leaving the 
mountains, would be the last attacked 
by Sennacherib on leaving the plain; 
and thus the pass of Beth-Horou, in 
which the Talmudic tradition places the 
destruction of his army (see Lightfoot, 
ii. 18), would naturally be his approach 
to Jerusalem. 

2 1 Sam. xvii. 2,19. See Appendix, 
Elah. 


The 

Western 

Passes. 


204 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


Battle of 
Betli-horon 
under 
Joshua. 


was not the usual route in ancient times, nor is it 
the most important in its hearing on the general course of 
Jewish history. Straight from the plain of Sharon a wide 
valley of cornfields runs straight up into the hills which here 
assume something of a bolder and higher form than usual. 
This is the valley of “ Ajalon,” or “ of Stags/’ of which the 
name is still preserved in a little village on its northern 
side, and of which the signification is said to be still justified 
by the gazelles 1 which the peasants hunt on its mountain 
slopes. The valley is slightly broken by a low ridge, on 
which stands the village of Beit-Nuba. Passing by two more 
hamlets, Beit-Sireh and Beit-Likhi, another ridge is crossed, 
and another village; and from thence begins a gradual 
ascent, through a narrower valley, almost approximating 
to the character of a ravine, at the foot of which, though 
on an eminence, marked by a few palms, stands the 
village of Beit-ur El-Tathi, whilst at the summit and eastern 
extremity of the pass, stands the village of Beit-ur El- 
Foka. 2 This is the pass of the Upper and Nether Beth- 
horon, “ the House of Caves,” of which there are still traces, 
though, perhaps, not enough to account for so emphatic a 
name. From this point another descent and ascent leads 
to a ridge which commands the heights above El-Jib, the 
modern village which thus retains the name of Gibeon ; 
and then once more a slight descent reaches that village, 
and from the village is mounted the high point, called 
Nebi-Samuel, from which is obtained the first view of 
Jerusalem and its wide table-land. 

These details give the main points of the scene of the 
most important battle in the Sacred History. 

On achieving 'the victory of Ai, the first march of the 
conquering army, so far as we can gather it from the 
narrative, was straight to the holy mountains of 

1 “Aijalon,” stags or gazelles. “There ruptions of Beth-Horon, “ the Nether,” 
would be many gazelles here ” was the and “ the Upper.” The interpretation 
answer of our muleteer, a native of one put by the peasants on the names is the 
of the adjacent villages, “if they were “house of the eye;” “upper” and 
not all shot, and there are many foxes.” “ lower” being interpreted to mean 
This last agrees with the juxta-position “the eye turned up,” or “the eye 
of the name of Aijalon with “Shaalbim,” turned down.” Schwarze (140—147) 
(jackals) in Jud. i. 35 ; Jos. xix. 42. .needlessly doubts the identity of Beit* 

2 These modern names are clearly cor* ur-El-Foka. 



THE HEIGHTS AND THE PASSES OF BENJAMIN. 


205 


Ebal and Gerizim. 1 But the seat of the nation was 
still at the scene of its first entrance, deep down in 
the Jordan valley at Gilgal. There Joshua received 
the two embassies from the Gibeonites—first, that which 
entrapped him into the hasty league, and next, that 
which summoned him to their defence. 2 This summons 
was as urgent as words can describe. It was a struggle 
for life and death for which his aid was demanded—• 
not only for Gibeon, but for the Israelites. They 
had hitherto only encountered the outskirts of the 
Canaanitish tribes. Now they were to meet the whole 
force of the hills of southern Palestine. “ The King 
of Jerusalem, the King of Hebron, the King of Jarmuth, 
the King of Lachish, the King of Eglon,”—two of 
them the rulers of the chief cities of the whole country 
—“ gathered themselves together, and went up, they and 
all their hosts, and camped before Gibeon ; and the men 
of Gibeon sent unto Joshua to the camp to Gilgal, 
saying, Slack not thy hand from thy servants ; come up 
to us quickly, and save us and help us : for all the kings 
of the Amorites that dwell in the mountains are gathered 
together against us/' 3 

Not a moment was to be lost. As in the battle of 
Marathon, everything depended on the suddenness 
of the blow which should break in pieces the hostile 
confederation. On the former occasion of Joshua’s 
visit to Gibeon, it had been a three days’ journey 
from Gilgal, as according to the slow pace of eastern 
armies and caravans it might well be. But now by 
a forced march ‘‘Joshua came unto them suddenly 
and went up from Gilgal all night.” When the sun 
rose behind him, he was already in the open ground at 
the foot of the heights of Gibeon, where the kings were 
encamped. As often before and after, so now, “ not a 
man ^eotild stand before” the awe and the panic of the 
sudden sound of that terrible shout—the sudden appear¬ 
ance of that undaunted host, who came with the assurance 
not “ to fear nor to be dismayed—but to be strong and of 

1 Jos. viii. 30. 2 Jos. ix. 6, x. 6. speed required, because it is the chief 

3 Jos. x. 1—6. I have dwelt on the point of the whole narrative. 





SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


a good courage, for the Lord had delivered their enemies 
into their hands.” 1 They fled down the western pass, 
and “ the Lord discomfited them before Israel, and slew 
them with a great slaughter at Gibeon, and chased them 
along the way that goetJt up to Beth-horon.” 2 This was the 
first stage of the flight—in the long ascent which I have 
described from Gibeon up to Beth-horon the Upper. “ And 
it came to pass as they fled from before Israel, and were 
in the going down of Beth-horon, that the Lord cast great 
stones from Heaven upon them unto Azekah.” 3 This was 
the second stage of the flight. The fugitives had out¬ 
stripped the pursuers, they had crossed the high ridge of 
Beth-horon the Upper ; they were in full flight down the 
descent to Beth-horon the Nether ; when, as afterwards 
in the fight of Barak against Sisera, one of the fearful 
tempests which from time to time sweep over the hills of 
Palestine, burst upon the disordered army, and “they 
were more which died with hailstones than they whom 
the children of Israel slew with the sword.” 4 

It is at this point that “ the Book of Jasher” presents 
us with that sublime picture, which however variously 
it always has been and perhaps always will be inter¬ 
preted, we may here take as we find it there expressed. 5 
On the summit of the pass—looking far down the deep 
descent of all the westward valleys, with the broad green 
vale of Ajalon unfolding in the distance into the open 
plain, with the yet wider expanse of the Mediterranean 
Sea beyond,—stood the Israelite chief. Below him was 
rushing down in wild confusion the Amorite host. Around 
him were “ all his people of war and all his mighty men of 
valour.” Behind him were the hills 6 which hid Gibeon— 
the now rescued Gibeon—from his sight. But the sun stood 
high above those hills,—“ in the midst of Heaven ; ” 7 for 

1 Jos. x. 8, 25. Gibeon itself is not visible, nor is there 

2 Jos. x. 10. 3 Jos. x. 11. any spot on these hills whence Gibeon 

4 Jos. x. 11. Compare Jud. iv. 15, v. and Ajalon can both be seen at once. 

20; 1 Sam. vii. 10. Joseph. Ant. V. i. 17. Schwarze (141) incorrectly says “ From 

3 The extract from the Book of this peak one can see Gibeon on the 

Jaslier is probably from verse 12 to east and Ajalon on the west.” 

verse 15, the reference being inserted 7 The emphatic expression (v. 13) not 
in the middle. simply “in the midst” but “in the bi- 

6 The only drawback from the exact section of the heavens,” seems intended 

appropriateness of this spot is, that to indicate noonday. 


THE HEIGHTS AND THE PASSES OF BENJAMIN. 


207 


the day had now far advanced since he had emerged from 
his night march through the passes of Ai, and in front, 
over the western vale of Ajalon, was the faint figure of the 
crescent moon visible above the hailstorm, which was fast 
driving up from the sea in the valleys below. Was the 
enemy to escape in safety, or was the speed with which 
Joshua had “ come quickly and saved and helped ” his 
defenceless allies to be still rewarded before the close of 
that day by a signal and decisive victory \ 

Doubtless with outstretched hand and spear, “ the hand 
that he drew not back, when he stretched out the spear, 
until he had utterly destroyed the inhabitants of Ai,” 
“ then spake Joshua to the Lord in the day when the Lord 
delivered the Amorites before the children of Israel, and 
he said in the sight of Israel, 

‘ Sun, stand thou still upon Gibeon ; 

* And thou Moon, in the valley of Ajalon. 

“ And the sun stood still and the moon stayed, until the 
people had avenged themselves upon their enemies.” 1 

So ended the second stage of the flight. The third is 
less distinct, from a variation in the text of the narrative. 2 
But following what seems the most probable reading, the 
pursuit still continued; “ and the Lord smote them to 
Azekah and unto Makkedah, and these five kings fled and 
hid themselves in a cave at Makkedah.” But Joshua 
halted not when he was told ; the same speed was still 
required, the victory was not yet won. “ Roll great stones,” 
he said “ upon the mouth of the cave, and set men by it 
for to keep them, and stay ye not, but pursue after your 
enemies and smite the hindmost of them ; suffer them 
not to enter into their cities ; for the Lord hath delivered 
them into your hands” We know not precisely the 
position of Makkedah, but it must have been probably 


1 The Mussulmans’ version of this 
event is that it was the battle which 
conquered Jericho, and that the day was 
Friday, and was lengthened in order to 
avoid the violation of the Sabbath, which 
would have begun at sunset; hence it 
was said the sacredness of the Mussulman 
Friday. Buckingham heard this story 
from the Arabs at Jericho (p. 302.) 


2 The LXX omits Joshua x. 15, which 
probably has been inserted from x. 
43—or, if genuine, must be taken as 
part of the extract from the Book 
of Jasher, winding up the whole ac¬ 
count of the war in the same manner 
as 1 Sam. xvii. 54. (See Keil’s Joshua, 
P . 179.) 





208 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


Battle of 
Beth-horon 
under 
Maccabseus. 


at the point where the mountains sink into the plain, 1 
that this last struggle took place; and thither at last 
to the camp at Makkedah “all the people of Israel 
returned in peace ; none moved his tongue against any of 
the people of Israel." There was enacted, as it would 
seem, the last act of the same eventful day ; the five 
kings were brought out and slain, and hanged on five trees 
until the evening, when at last that memorable Sun went 
down. “It came to pass at the time of the going down 
of the sun, that Joshua commanded, and they took them 
down from off the trees, and cast them into the cave 
wherein they had been hid, and laid great stones in the 
cave's mouth. . . . And that day Joshua took Makkedah, 
and smote it with the edge of the sword, and the king 
thereof he utterly destroyed, them, and all the souls that 
were therein ; he let none remain." 2 And then followed 
the rapid succession of victory and extermination which 
swept the whole of southern Palestine into the hands 
of Israel. The possession of every place, sacred for them 
and for all future ages, from the plain of Esdraelon to 
the southern Desert,—Shechem, Shiloh, Gibeon, Beth¬ 
lehem, Hebron,—was, with the one exception of Jeru¬ 
salem, involved in the issue of that conflict. “ And all 
those kings and their land did Joshua take at one 
time , because the Lord God of Israel fought for Israel. 
And Joshua returned and all Israel with him to the camp 
to Gilgal." 3 

In comparison with this scene, to which “ there was no 
day like, before or after it," it seems trivial to descend to 
any lesser events which illustrate the same points. Yet 
the recollection of that first victory of their race may well 
have inspirited Judas Maccabseus; who, himself a native of 
the neighbouring hills, won his earliest fame in this same 
“ going up and coming down of Beth-horon," where in 
like manner “ the residue ” of the defeated army fled 

1 This follows from its being men- x. 17). The position assigned to it by 
tioned among the cities of the Philistine Eusebius, eight miles east of Eleutliero- 
plain (Shefela), on the one hand (Joshua polis, is hardly compatible with thb 
xv. 41), and from the mention of the nai’rative. 
large cave, only to be found in the 2 Jos. x. 22—28. 

mountains, on the other hand (Joshua 3 Jos. x. 42, 43. 


THE HEIGHTS AND THE PASSES OF BENJAMIN. 


209 


into “ the plain,” “ into the land of the Philistines.” 1 
Over this same pass was carried the great Roman road Against 
from Caesarea to Jerusalem, up which Cestius advanced Cestius * 
at the first onset of the Roman armies on the capital 
of Judaea, and down which he and his whole force were 
driven by the insurgent Jews. 2 By a singular coinci¬ 
dence the same scene thus witnessed the first and the last 
great victory that crowned the Jewish arms at the interval 
of nearly fifteen hundred years. From their camp at 
Gibeon, the Romans, as the Canaanites before them, were 
dislodged; they fled in similar confusion down the ravine 
to Beth-horon, the steep cliffs and the rugged road render¬ 
ing their cavalry unavailable against the merciless fury of 
their pursuers ; they were only saved,—as the Canaanites 
were not saved,—by the too rapid descent of the shades 
of night over the mountains, and under the cover of those 
shades they escaped to Antipatris in the plain below. 

Ages afterwards the Crusading armies, in the vain hope 
of reaching Jerusalem, advanced up the same valleys from 
their quarters at Ascalon and Jaffa, and the last eastern 
point at which Richard encamped was at Beit-Nuba, in 
the wide vale of Ajalon. A well near the village of 
Ajalon bears the name of Bir-el-Khebir, “ the well of the 
hero.” It is a strange complexity of associations which 
renders it doubtful whether “ the hero ” so handed down 
by tradition be the great leader of the hosts of Israel, or 
the flower of English chivalry. 

II. From the passes of the tribe of Benjamin we turn by Heights of 
a natural connection to those remarkable heights which Ben j arum - 
guard their entrance into the table-land, and which diver¬ 
sify with their pointed summits that table-land itself. The 
very names of the towns of Benjamin indicate how emi¬ 
nently they partook of this general characteristic of the 
position of Judaean cities—Gibeah—Geba—Gibeon—all 
signifying “ hill,”—Ramah, “ a high place,”—Mizpeh, 

“ the watch-tower.” And it has been already observed how 
from these heights, to the north of Jerusalem, is in all like¬ 
lihood derived the ancient image of “ God standing about 


1 1 Macc. iii. 16, 24. 


2 Josephus, Bell. Jud. II. xix. 




210 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


Nebi* 
Samuel or 
Gibeon. 


his people/’ On most of these it is needless to enlarge. 
El-Bireh, the ancient Beeroth, is remarkable as the first 
halting-place of caravans on the northern road from 
Jerusalem, and therefore, not improbably, the scene of 
the event to which its monastic tradition lays claim,—the 
place where the “ parents ” of Jesus “ sought him among 
their kinsfolk and acquaintance, and when they found him 
not, turned back again to Jerusalem.” Er-Ram, marked 
by the village and green patch on its summit, first seen by 
the traveller on his approach to Jerusalem from the south, 
is certainly “ Ramah of Benjamin.” Tel-el-Fulil, dis¬ 
tinguished by its curiously knobbed and double top, is in 
all probability Gibeah, the birth-place of Saul, and during 
his reign, the capital of his tribe and kingdom, and from 
him deriving the name of “ Gibeah of Saul,” 1 as before 
“ of Benjamin ;” 2 “ the hill of Benjamin,” or “ of Saul.” 
Just out of sight of Jerusalem, Anathoth, the birth-place of 
Jeremiah, looks down on the Dead Sea. Jeba, on the wild 
hills between Gibeah and Michmash, is clearly “Geba,” 
famous as the scene of Jonathan's ‘first exploit against the 
Philistines. 3 From its summit is seen northward the 
white chalky height of Rummon, the “ ‘ cliff ’ Rimmon ” 
overhanging the Jordan “ wilderness,” where the remnant 
of the Benjamites maintained themselves in the general 
ruin of their tribe. 4 Further still, the dark conical hill 
of Tayibeh, with its village perched aloft, like those of the 
Apennines, the probable 5 representative of Ophrah of 
Benjamin, 6 in later times “the city called Ephraim” to 
which our Lord retired, “ near to the wilderness,” after 
the raising of Lazarus. 7 

1. But two of these heights, in historical importance, 
stand out from all the rest. Of all the points of interest 
about Jerusalem, none perhaps gains so much from an 
actual visit to Palestine as the lofty peaked eminence 

1 1 Sam. x. 26; xi. 4; xv. 34; 2 Sam. had dispossessed the Philistines. In 2 

xxi. 6; Isa. x. 29. Kings xxiii. 8; Zech. xiv. 10; it is spoken 

2 1 Sam. xiii. 2, 15, 16; xiv. 16; 2 of as the northern boundary of the 

Sam. xxiii. 29. kingdom of Judah. 

3 1 Sam. xiii. 3. In xiii. 16; xiv. 5, 4 Jud. xx. 47. 

“Geba” is wrongly rendered “Gibeah;” 5 See Robinson, ii. 124. 

Saul and Jonathan having evidently 6 Josh, xviii. 23; 1 Sam. xiii. 17. 
seized the stronghold from which they 7 John xi. 54. 


THE HEIGHTS AND THE PASSES OF BENJAMIN. 


211 


which fills up the north-west corner of the table-land, 
seen in every direction, the highest elevation in the 
whole country south of Hermon, commanding a view 
far wider than that of Olivet, inasmuch as it includes 
the western plain and Mediterranean Sea on one 
side, as well as Olivet and Jerusalem in the distance, 
backed by the range of Moab. It is in fact the point 
from which travellers mounting by the ancient route 
through the pass of Beth-horon obtained their earliest 
glimpse of the interior of the hills of Palestine. “ It is 
a very fair and delicious place/ 5 says Maundeville, “ and it 
is called Mount-Joy, because it gives joy to pilgrims 5 
hearts ; for from that place men first see Jerusalem. 55 
And it was probably on that height that Richard Coeur 
de Lion, advancing from his camp in the Valley of Ajalon, 
stood in sight of Jerusalem, but buried his face in his 
armour, with the noble exclamation, “ Ah! Lord God, I 
pray that I may never see thy Holy City, if so be that 
I may not rescue it from the hands of thine enemies. 551 
It can only be from the uncertainty of its ancient identity 
that it has been passed.over by modern travellers in com¬ 
parative silence. At present it bears the name of Nebi- 
Samuel, which is derived from the Mussulman tradition 
—now perpetuated by a mosque and tomb—that here lies 
buried the prophet Samuel. 2 In the time of the Crusaders 
it was regarded—not unnaturally, if they merely consi¬ 
dered the grandeur of the position—as the site of the 
great sanctuary of Shiloh. In the manifest impossibilities 
of either of these assumptions, it has by the latest inves¬ 
tigators been identified with Mizpeh. 

But a closer examination of its position will probably 
lead to a more certain and satisfactory result. It stands, 
as we have already seen, at the head of the pass of Beth- 
horon ; and on a lower eminence at its northern roots, 

1 Gibbon, c. 59, but inaccurately from which can hardly be anything else than 
Joinville (part 2). Joinville mentions Nebi-Samuel. And no other suits 
no place. But Vinisauf, though with- Richard’s position, 
out the speech, relates the king’s ascent 2 “ He built the tomb in his life- 
of a hill; and Coggeshalle (p. 823), time,” said the Mussulman guardian of 
though without any allusion to this the mosque to us, “ but was not buried 
story, speaks of his visit to a hermit here till after the expulsion of the 
“apud Samuelem in monte quodam,” Greeks.” 

t> 2 






212 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


one of those rounded hills which characterise especially 
the western formation of Judaea—-rises the village of El- 
Jib, which, both by its name and situation, is incontestably 
identified with the ancient Gibeon. Gibeon was the head 
of the powerful Hivite league, which included three of the 
adjacent towns, Beeroth, Kirjath-jearim, and Chephirah; 1 
and this circumstance, with its important post as the key of 
the pass of Beth-horon, made it “ a great city,” 2 and, though 
not under royal government, equal in rank to “ one of the 
royal cities ; ” celebrated for its strength and the wisdom 
of its inhabitants. 3 Hence it was that the raising of the 
siege of Gibeon, as already described in the account of the 
battle of Beth-horon, was so vital to the conquest of 
Canaan. But the chief fame of Gibeon in later times 
was not derived from the city itself, but from the “ great 
high place ” 4 hard by, whither, after the destruction of its 
seat at Nob or Olivet, the tabernacle was brought, and 
where it remained till it was thence removed to Jerusalem 
by Solomon. It can hardly be doubted that to this great 
sanctuary the lofty height of Nebi-Samuel, towering imme¬ 
diately over the town of El-Jib, exactly corresponds. We 
see at once the appropriateness of the transference to this 
eminence, when it could no longer remain on the opposite 
ridge of Olivet; and, if this peak were thus the “great 
high place ” of Solomon's worship, a significance is given 
to what otherwise would be a blank and nameless feature 
in a region where all the less conspicuous hills are dis¬ 
tinguished by some historical name, and a ground for 
the sanctity with which the Mussulman and Christian 
traditions have invested it, as the Ramah and the Shiloh 
of Samuel, even though those traditions themselves are 
without foundation. In Epiphanius' time 5 it still bore the 
name of the Mountain of Gibeon; and from its conspicuous 
height the name of “ Gibeon,” (“ belonging to a hill,”) was 
naturally derived to the city itself, which lay always 
where its modern representative lies now, on the lower 


1 Jos. ix. 17. 

2 Jos. x. 2. 

3 Jos. ix. 4, x. 2. 

4 1 Kings iii.4; ix. 2; 2 Cliron.,3,13 


6 Epiph. (Hser. 394). “ The mountain 
of Gibeon, eight miles from Jerusalem, 
is the highest .” This identifies it with 
Nebi-Samuel. 


THE HEIGHTS AND THE PASSES OF BENJAMIN. 

eminence. From thence the Gibeonites “ hewed the 
wood' 7 of the adjacent valley, and “drew the water” 1 
from the springs and tanks with which its immediate 
neighbourhood abounds, and carried them up to the 
Sacred Tent, and there attended the “ altar of the 
Lord,” which, from its proud elevation, overlooked the 
wide domain of Israel. 

The same point—although here one must speak more 
doubtfully—was, probably, “ the hill of God,” 2 which, from 
its commanding situation, was garrisoned by the Philis¬ 
tines in the time of Samuel to guard the pass, and on which, 
for a similar reason, though with a different object, the pro¬ 
phets assembled on “ the high place,” whence they were 
descending when Saul met them on his return from the 
neighbourhood of Bethlehem to his own home at Gibeah. 3 
Probably, too, it is “ the mountain ” where the Gibeonites 
hung up the seven sons of Saul “ before the Lord,” that 
is, before the tabernacle on its summit, in revenge for the 
massacre of their kindred by Saul. 4 

2. From the sanctuary which guarded the entrance into 
Judaea from the west, we advance naturally to the still 
greater sanctuary which guarded it on the north and east. 
As the passage of Beth-horon led up to Gibeon, so the 
passage of Michmash and Ai led up to Bethel. Bethel 
lay in the direct thoroughfare of Palestine ; 5 whether the 
course of a conqueror or a traveller brought him through 
the long valley so often described, from the bed of the 
Jordan, or through the mountains of Judah, Benjamin, 
and Ephraim, north and south, he could not avoid seeing 

tain of the Lord with Gibeah. But 
the expression “ mountain ” and “before 
the Lord ” are hardly suitable to any¬ 
thing, except the high place of the 
Tabernacle, and it may well be doubted 
whether the 8th verse is not corrupt or 
wrongly translated. However closely 
the title of “ the chosen of the Lord ” 
may have been affixed to the name of 
Saul, it is hardly probable that it would 
have formed part of the title of the 
city. 

5 Compare, the highway that “goeth 
up to ‘Bethel,’ Jud. xx. 31; “the 
highway that goeth up from Bethel to 
Shechem,” Jud. xxi. 19. 


1 Jos. ix. 27. 

2 1 Sam. x. 5. 

3 It is of course doubtful whether 
“ the hill ” mentioned in x. 5, 10, (and 
(lxx) 13, for “high place,”) is not 
Gibeah. But the mention of the high 
place above and the city below (x. 5), 
and the arrival of Saul thither, ap¬ 
parently before his return home, is in 
favour of the view given in the text. 
It might, however, be Bethel. 

4 2 Sam. xxi. 9. Here again, the 
comparison with verse 6, (“We will 
hang them up unto the Lord in Gibeah 
of Saul whom the Lord did choose”) 
suggests the identification of the moun- 


213 


Bethkl. 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


214 

the heights of Bethel. Hence arises what may be called 
its peculiar antiquity of interest. The remarkable scenes 
of Sacred History which it has thus witnessed, occupy 
(with the single exception of Shechem) a longer series 
than any other spot in Palestine. 

It was the first place where Abraham is said to have 
“pitched his tent” when he “journeyed” “through the 
land,” “going on still toward the south,” on his way to 
Egypt; 1 and to the same spot, “ even to the place where 
his tent had been at the beginning, unto the place 
of the altar which he had made there at the first/' 2 
(so emphatically is the locality marked) he came 
Sanctuary again as to the familiar scene of his first encampment, 
Abraham° f 011 return from Egypt. The tent and altar were 
not, however, strictly speaking at Bethel, but on “ the 
mountain east of Bethel, having Bethel on the west, 
and Ai on the east.” 3 This is a precision the more to 
be noticed, because it makes the whole difference in the 
truth and vividness of the remarkable scene which follows. 
Immediately east of the low gray hills, on which the Ca- 
naanitish Luz and the Jewish Bethel afterwards stood, rises, 
—as the highest of a succession of eminences, each now 
marked by some vestige of ancient edifices,—a conspicuous 
hill, its topmost summit resting, as it were, on the rocky 
slopes below, and distinguished from them by the olive- 
grove which clusters over its broad surface above. From 
this height, thus offering a natural base for the patri¬ 
archal altar, and a fitting shade for the patriarchal tent, 
Abraham and Lot must be conceived as taking the wide 
survey of the country “ on the right hand and on the left,” 
such as can be enjoyed from no other point in the neigh¬ 
bourhood. To the east there rises in the foreground the 
jagged range of the hills above Jericho; in the distance 
the dark wall of Moab ; between them lies the wide valley 
of the Jordan—its course marked by the tract of forest in 
which its rushing stream is enveloped ; and down to this 
valley, a long and deep ravine, now, as always, the main 

1 Gen. xii. 8, 9. 2 Gen. xiii. 3, 4. Jos. xvi. 1; 1 Sam. xiii. 2; 2 Kings 

■ Gen. xii. 8. It is this, apparently, xxiii. 16, where in all cases the context 
•which is called the mountain of Bethel. implies a situation east of the town. 


THE HEIGHTS AND THE PASSES OF BENJAMIN. 


215 


line of communication by which it is approached from 
the central hills of Palestine—a ravine rich with vine, 
olive, and fig, winding its way through ancient reservoirs 
and sepulchres, remains of a civilisation now extinct, but 
in the times of the patriarchs not yet begun. To the 
south and the west the view commanded the bleak hills of 
Judaea, varied by the heights crowned with what were 
afterwards the cities of Benjamin, and overhanging what 
in a later day was to be Jerusalem, 1 —and in the far dis¬ 
tance the southern range on whose slope is Hebron. 
Northward are the hills which divide Judaea from the rich 
plains of Samaria. 

This is the view which was to Abraham what Pisgah 
was afterwards to his great descendant. This was to the 
two lords of Palestine, then almost “free before them, 
where to choose,” what in Grecian legends is repre¬ 
sented under the figure of the Choice of Hercules; in the 
fables of Islam under the story of the Prophet turning- 
back from Damascus. 2 “And Lot lifted up his eyes,” 
towards the right, “and beheld all the ‘circle' of Jordan, 
that it was well watered everywhere .... even as the 
garden of the Lord, like unto Egypt.” He saw not, indeed, 
the tropical fertility and copious streams along its course. 
But he knew of its fame, as of the garden of Eden, as of the 
valley of the Nile ; no crust of salt, no volcanic convul¬ 
sions had as yet blasted its verdure, or touched the secure 
civilisation of the early Phoenician settlements which had 
struck root within its deep abyss. “ Then Lot chose him 
all the ‘ circle ' of the Jordan, and Lot journeyed east; 
and they separated themselves one from the other .... 
and Lot dwelt in the cities of the ‘circle' of the Jordan, 
and pitched his tent towards Sodom. But the men of 
Sodom were wicked and sinners before the Lord exceed¬ 
ingly. And the Lord said unto Abram after that Lot 
had separated from him, ‘ Lift up now thine eyes, and 
look from the place where thou art, northward and south¬ 
ward, and eastward and westward ; for all the land which 
thou seest, to thee I will give it, and to thy seed for 

1 A wLite building close to the outskirts of Jerusalem is visible but not the 
city itself. 2 See Chapter XII. 


21G 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


Sanctuary 
of Jacob. 


ever .... and I will make thy seed as the dust of the 
earth, so that if a man can number the dust of the earth, 
then shall thy seed be numbered. Arise, walk through 
the land in the length of it and in the breadth of it ; for 
I will give it unto thee.” 1 Those bleak hills were indeed 
to be the site of cities whose names would be held in 
honour after the very ruins of the seats of a corrupt 
civilisation in the garden of the Jordan would have been 
swept away ; that dreary view, unfolded then in its 
primeval desolation before the eyes of the now solitary 
Patriarch, would be indeed peopled with a mighty nation 
through many generations, with mighty recollections “like 
the dust of the earth in number, for ever.” 

The next scene is less easily identified. Yet thus much 
may be said. The western slopes of the ridge just 
described are crossed by the track which the thorough¬ 
fare of centuries has worn in the central route of Pales¬ 
tine. This track winds through an uneven valley, covered, 
as with gravestones, by large sheets of bare rock; some 
few here and there standing up like the cromlechs of 
Druidical monuments. It is impossible not to recall, in 
this “ stony territory,” 2 the wanderer who “ went out 
from Beersheba and went toward Haran ; and he lighted 
upon a certain place, and tarried there all night, because 
the sun was set; and he took of the stones of that place 
and put them for his pillow, and lay down in that place 
to sleep.” Then rose the vision of the night, “ the 
ladder whose foot was set upon the earth,”—on the 
bare sheet of rocky ground on which the sleeper lay,— 
“and whose top reached to heaven,”—into the depths 
of the starry sky, which, in that wide and open space, with 
no intervening tree or tent, was stretched over his head. 
“ A nd Jacob awaked out of his sleep, and said, Surely 
the Lord is in this place, and I knew it not; and he 
was afraid, and said, How dreadful is this place—this is 
none other than the house of God, and this is the gate 
of heaven.” Such was the beginning of Beth-El, “ the 

1 Gen. xiii. 10—17. the record of the stony territory, where 

2 Gen. xxviii. 10—17. “The nature he ‘took of the stones of that place.’” 
of the soil is an existing comment on (Clarke, vol. iv. p. 287.) 


THE HEIGHTS AND THE PASSES OF BENJAMIN. 


217 


House of God,” the place which bore, amidst all the subse¬ 
quent sanctuaries of the Holy Land, the distinctive name 
which has since spread to every holy place throughout the 
world. Its connection with the scene is best expressed in 
the wanderer’s own words, “ The Lord is in this place, and 
I knew it not.” There is, indeed, nothing to indicate the 
Divine Presence, no religio loci , no awful shades, no lofty 
hills. Bare wild rocks, a beaten thoroughfare ; these are 
the only features of the primeval sanctuary of that God, of 
whom nature itself there teaches us, that if He could, in 
such a scene, so emphatically reveal Himself to the house¬ 
less exile, He “is with him,” and with His true servants, 
everywhere, and will “ keep them in all places whither 
they go.” 

From that rude beginning—the rough “stone that 
Jacob set up for a pillar” 1 —grew the sanctuary of 
Bethel. First, rose the altar which he himself built there 
on his return, above the e oak of tears’ beneath which, in 
the vale below, Deborah was buried ; 2 then it became 
the seat of the assemblies gathered there in the time of 
the Judges ; 3 and, finally, when it seemed on the point 
of being superseded by the new sanctuary at Jerusalem, 
it assumed a fresh importance as the Holy Place of the 
northern kingdom. • 

It is in this last aspect that its remaining history is 
remarkable. In ancient times, before the Conquest of 
Joshua, there had already existed a Canaanitish city 
on the spot named Luz, 4 situated on the western slope 
of the mountain of Abraham’s altar; 5 the same, pro¬ 
bably, whose inhabitants came forth to assist their neigh¬ 
bours of Ai, when attacked by Joshua. It was not 

taken at that time, and seems long to have resisted the 

invaders. At last it fell before the arms, not of the 
little tribe of Benjamin, wdthin whose territory it was 
included, but of the powerful house of Joseph, who 

1 Gen. xxviii. 18. 3 Judg. xx. 18, 26. The words are in 

2 Gen. xxxv. 6—8. Allon-Bachuth= both cases translated “the House of 

Oak of Tears. This is probably the God.” 

same oak as that referred to in 1 4 Judges i. 23. 

Sam. x. 8 (though there translated 6 Joshua xvi. 1. 

‘ plain ”); 1 Kings xiii. 14. 


Sanctuary 
of the 
Northern 
Tribes. 




218 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


Jeroboam’s 

Temple. 


attacked it from the north, and who thus acquired 
possession of it for their descendants, though properly 
speaking it had been allotted to Benjamin . 1 In this 
respect there is a singular analogy between Bethel and 
Jerusalem. Each, situated in the tribe of Benjamin, 
resisted, by a strong position, the first shock of the 
conquest, and being ultimately taken, not by that tribe 
itself, but the one by its more powerful neighbour on the 
south, the other by its more powerful neighbour on the 
north, passed out of its history into theirs. And the 
frontier which at Jerusalem had been originally drawn by 
the ravine of the Kedron and of Hinnom, at Bethel was 
drawn by the gorge of the Wady Suweinit, which has 
been so often mentioned as the pass from Jericho, and 
which in later times served the purpose of the southern 
boundary of the northern kingdom. Bethel thus became 
doubly important to the new state; first as a strong 
frontier-fortress, but still more as a sanctuary, founded on 
the holiest recollections, and in a great measure supplying 
the place which Shiloh had of old filled in the same 
great tribe of Ephraim. What structure there may have 
been in former ages commemorating the Vision of Jacob, 
it is impossible now to determine. “ The House of God”— 
the “ Beth-El”—described as the scene of the assemblies in 
the period of the Judges, was probably some rude monu¬ 
ment of primitive times, bearing the same relation to the 
Temple which Jeroboam afterwards built near or round 
it, as the original sanctuary of the Mahometan world— 
known by the very same name, Beit-Allah, “the House of 
God”—bears to the magnificent enclosure with which 
Mussulman devotion has since surrounded it. On both 
of the two lower eminences which overhang the modern 
village are ruins which may possibly indicate the site of 
Jeroboam's Temple. Above it, on the east, are the 
higher “ mountains and hills,” to which (in the language 2 
of Hosea) the inhabitants of Bethel would in the day of 
their shame call “ to cover ” and to “ fall on them.” It 
was built, we cannot doubt, with all the splendour which 


Judges i. 22—25. 


2 Hosea x. 8. 


THE HEIGHTS AND THE PASSES OF BENJAMIN. 


219 


his acquaintance with Egyptian worship , 1 and his desire 
to emulate the glory of the rival sanctuary of Jerusalem, 
would necessarily dictate. It was, we know, regarded 
emphatically as “the king’s sanctuary ,” as “the king’s 
house ,” 2 with a high “priest /’ 3 and “the noise of songs/’ 
and “ the melody of viols,” and “ burnt-offerings and meat¬ 
offerings,” and “feast days,” and “solemn assemblies .” 4 
And it was on the greatest of those feast days, “the 
fifteenth day of the eighth month,” which Jeroboam had 
“ devised out of his own heart,”—in imitation of the great 
Feast of Tabernacles, which Solomon had chosen for the 
festival of the dedication of the Temple on Mount Moriah, 
—that Jeroboam took his place by the altar which stood 
before the statue of the Golden Calf, and was interrupted 
at the very moment of inauguration by the sudden and 
awful apparition of the Man of God from Judah . 5 In that 
story and its consequences is contained almost all that 
we know of the later history of Bethel. The schools of 
the prophets 6 still lingered round the sacred place, when 
Elijah passed through it down the long defile—then men¬ 
tioned for the last time in history—on his way to Jericho. 
But the chief association which the Jews of Jerusalem 
attached to it was of the rival and idolatrous Temple. 
The very name of Beth-El, “ the House of God,” was in 
the times of the later prophets, exchanged for “Betli- 
aven,” 7 —“the House of Idols,”—and, when Josiah passed 
through, it was to destroy and not to build up. The 
“altar” and “the high place” of Jeroboam, and the 


1 1 Kings xi. 40; xii. 2. 

2 Amos vii. 13. “ Mikdash” “sanc¬ 

tuary,” expressing the union of temple 
and asylum. “Beth” (house), in allu¬ 
sion to Bethel. In the English version 
the words are respectively mistranslated 
“chapel” and “court.” 

3 Amos vii. 10. 

4 Amos v. 21, 22, 23. 

5 1 Kings xii. 32; xiii. 5. 

6 2 Kings ii. 3. 

7 Hoseaiv. 15; v. 8; x. 5, 8; perhaps, 
vi. 8; Amos v. 5. “Aven” is properly 
“ nought ” and is in Amos v. 5, so 
rendered; but is also a name for idols. 
(Isaiah lxvi. 3.) The use of the name, as 
in Hosea v. 8, is a little confused by the 


appearance of a Beth-Aven near Bethel 
in the east, which probably suggested the 
transference of the name. (1 Sam. xiii. 5; 
xiv. 23; Jos. vii. 2.) Yet perhaps these 
are only corrections of “Bethel” by 
the later copyists, to whom the con¬ 
temptuous name was familiar. In 
neither passage does it appear in the 
lxx, who in Jos. vii. 2 omit it alto¬ 
gether, and in 1 Sam. xiii. 5, substitute 
Beth-Horon, which, however, can hardly 
be the correct reading; unless another 
Beth-Horon than the famous pass be 
meant. For the substitution of the con¬ 
temptuous name compare “Sycliar” 
(drunken) for Shechem, John iv. 5. 


Josiah. 




220 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


grove and worship of Astarte that had grown up round 
it, he razed and burnt . 1 And “as Josiah turned/” we 
are told, “he spied the sepulchres that were there in 
the Mount.” 2 The “ Mount ” doubtless is the same as 
the “ mountain ” on the east of Bethel, described in the 
history of Abraham. The “sepulchres” must be the 
numerous rock-hewn tombs still visible in the whole 
descent from that “mountain” to the Wady Suweinit. 
In one of those, though we know not which, lay side by 
side the bones of the two prophets—the aged Prophet 
of Bethel and his brother and victim, the “ Man of God 
from Judah ,” 3 and they were left to repose. From that 
time the desolation foretold by Amos and Hosea has 
never been disturbed ; and Beth-El, “ the house of God,” 
has become literally Beth-aven, “the house of nought.” 

1 2 Kings xxiii. 15. 2 2 Kings xxiii, 16. 3 2 Kings xxiii. 17, 18. 


NOTE ON HAMAH AND MIZPEH. 

I.-THE RAMAH OF SAMUEL. 

There is no general interest in discussing the precise situation of 
Hamah, the birth-place, residence, and burial-place of Samuel, further 
than what attaches to anything which relates to the life of so remark¬ 
able a man. But the question is invested with an incidental interest 
which may make it worth a few moments’ investigation. It is, 
without exception, the most complicated and disputed problem of 
Sacred topography. It is almost the only passage in which the text 
of the Scriptural narrative (1 Sam. ix. 1—x. 10) seems to be at 
variance with the existing localities. 

All that we know certainly about the place is, that it was on 
an erhinence, as its name of “ Bamali ” implies, and was situated 
somewhere south of Gibeah, the birth-place of Saul; as it is hardly 
possible to avoid identifying the city where Saul found Samuel with 
the usual residence of that prophet. This, which is not stated ex¬ 
pressly in the Old Testament, is taken for granted by Josephus. 
From the dual termination to the name Ramatkaim —by which it 
is called in the Hebrew and lxx text of 1 Sam. i. 1, and by 
Josephus always, and from which the name of Arimathea seems to 
be derived 1 in the New Testament—it might be inferred that it was 

1 The lxx name Ap/.ia.6aifx shows the beginning of the transition. 



THE HEIGHTS AND THE PASSES OP BENJAMIN. 


221 


an eminence with a double height. To this spot there are no less 
than eight claimants. 

1. Ramleh, the chief modem city of the plain of Philistia, and 
selected as the spot by Christian tradition. Its situation in the 
level plain, though on a slight eminence, is much against its 
identity; and the name, which at first sight appears similar, is the 
Arabic word for " sandy,” and is in all probability derived from 
the sandy tract in which it stands. (See Chapter VI.) Still it is 
remarkable that Eusebius and Jerome speak of Ramatkaim as near 
Lydda, to which no other site corresponds. 

2. Nebi-Samuel, the height above Gibeon. This has its height 
and the Mahometan tradition in its favour. 

3. Er-Ram, on the road from Jerusalem to Bethel. This has 
the name in its favour. 

These two sites labour under the objection that they are north 
and not south of Rachel's tomb; and therefore that Saul could 
never have passed by that tomb in going from either of them to 
Gibeah. Er-Ram is, besides, close to Gibeah, which is against 
1 Sam. x. 10. 

4. “Ramah,” a hill, a short distance north of Bethlehem, which, 
according to some accounts, is so called by the peasants. This is 
fixed upon by Mr. Einn, the English Consul at Jerusalem. 

5. The Frank Mountain, or Jebel-er-Fureidis, a little south-east of 
Bethlehem. This is fixed upon by Gesenius. 

6. The ruins called Ramet-el-Khalil, a little north of Hebron. 
(Described in Chapter I. part ii.) This is fixed upon by Mr. Wolcott 
and M. Van de Velde. 

7. Soba, a town on a hill, in the mountains north-west of 
Bethlehem. This is fixed upon by Dr. Robinson. 

8. A village called Rame, three and a half miles west of Sanur, 
w r hich Schwarze (p. 157) endeavours to identify with Ramathaim by 
altering the reading of Dothaim, in Judith iv. 5, 6, 7. 

Of these, the fourth, sixth, and eighth, have the identity of name 
in their favour, and the seventh may have derived its present name 
from Zophim. The fifth has only its commanding position, and 
the argument that if it be not Ramah, then it is unknown to the 
Old Testament. 

All of these, except the eighth, are equally compatible with the 
journey by Rachel's tomb, but are all equally excluded if Ramah 
must be sought among the mountains of Ephraim. Of the two 
difficulties, however, the latter is the least insuperable. It is easier 
to suppose that Elkanah may have migrated from Mount Ephraim, 
than to explain away the stages of the return of Saul. And it 
must be added, that if a position in Mount Ephraim be required, 
it must entirely exclude Ramleh, and probably Er-Ram and Nebi- 
Samuel. 





222 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


There is perhaps little to choose between them, though the fifth 
and sixth are improbable.. It may be observed, that the connection 
introduced in Matt. ii. 18, between Ramah and Bethlehem, evidently 
implies that in the mind of the evangelist, Ramah was in sight both 
of Rachel's tomb and of Bethlehem. The words, “ by Zelzah,” in 
1 Sam. x. 2, cannot be relied upon; as the lxx, with great proba¬ 
bility, makes the word an expression of joy on the part of the men 
who announced the finding of the asses. “Thou shalt meet two 
men leaping violently,—aWoplvovs piyaXa.” The other clause, 
however, in the border of Benjamin , is important in showing how 
far south this boundary reached. Probably it was extended just far 
enough to include the tomb of their great ancestress. Of the two 
remaining stages of Saul's journey (1 Sam. x. 1—10), “the oak of 
Tabor" may possibly be the famous “oak of Deborah," Gen. xxxv. 8; 
and “ the hill of God," Gibeah-Elohim, may be Gibeon, Gibeah of 
Saul, or Bethel. Against each hypothesis there are objections; no 
conclusive argument in behalf of any. 


II.—MIZPEH. 

If Nebi-Samuel be the high place of Gibeon, then Mizpeh, which 
Dr. Robinson planted there, must be sought elsewhere. One spot 
immediately suggests itself. Mizpeh—always with the article, c< the 
Mizpeh"—is in Hebrew, what Scopus is in Greek, “the watch- 
tower ." Wherever Scopus was,—and we know that it was some 
eminence on the north of the city, whence the city and temple were 
visible—there it is most natural to place Mizpeh. Such a position 
will meet every requirement of the notices of Mizpeh—the assem¬ 
blies held there by Samuel 1 —the fortification of it by Asa with 
the stones removed from ‘ the Mount' of Benjamin 2 —the seat of the 
Chaldean governor after the capture of Jerusalem 3 —the wailing- 
place of the Maccabees. 4 

1 1 Sam. vii. 5, 6. 3 Neh. iii. 7 ; Jer. xl. 6. 

2 Ramah. 1 Kings xv. 22. 4 1 Macc. iii. 4(5. 



CHAPTER V. 

- 4 - 

EPHRAIM AND MANASSEH. 

Deuteronomy, xxxiii. 13—17. “And of Joseph he said, Blessed of the 
Lord be his land, for the precious things of heaven, for the dew, and 
for the deep that coucheth beneath, and for the precious fruits brought 
forth by the sun, and for the precious things put forth by the moon, 
and for the chief things of the ancient mountains, and for the precious 
things of the lasting hills, and for the precious things of the earth, and 
fulness thereof, and for the good will of him that dwelt in the bush: 
let the blessing come upon the head of Joseph, and upon the top of the 
head of him that was separated from his brethren. His glory is like the 
firstling of his bullock, and his horns are like the horns of ‘buffaloes:’ 
with them he shall push the people together to the ends of the earth ; 
and they are the ten thousands of Ephraim, and they are the thousands 
of Manasseh.” 


Mountains of Ephraim—Fertile valleys and central situation—Supremacy of 
Ephraim. I. Shiloh. II. Shechem.—1. First halting-place of Abra¬ 
ham. 2. First settlement of Jacob. 3. First capital of the conquest 
—Sanctuary of Gferizim. 4. Reign of Abimelech. 5. Sect of Sama¬ 
ritans. 6. Jacob’s well. III. Samaria.—Its beauty—Its strength— 
Sebaste. IV. Passes of Manasseh—Dothan. 

Note on Mount Gferizim. 




MAP OF SHECHEM. 



1. Jacob’s Well. 

2. Joseph’s Tomb. 

3. Tomb of Eabbi Joseph. 

4. Holy Place of the Samaritans. 

(See page 229.) 



225 


EPHRAIM AND MANASSEH. 


The narrow territory of Benjamin soon melts into the 
hills which reach to the plain of Esdraelon; and which, 
from the great tribe which there had its chief seat, are 
known by the name of “ the mountains of Ephraim.” 

Their history is contained in two peculiarities. First, 
they are the central mass of the hills of Palestine, nearly 
equidistant from the northern and southern boundary of 
the whole country; and, secondly, the closely set struc¬ 
ture, and the rocky soil of the hills of Judah and Benjamin, 
though still continued to a gr.eat extent, is here for the 
first time occasionally broken up into wide plains in the 
heart of the mountains, and diversified both in hill and 
valley by streams of running water, and by continuous 
tracts of verdure and vegetation. It was this central 
tract and this “good land ” that was naturally allotted to 
the powerful house of Joseph in the first division of the 
country. We are so familiar with the supremacy of the 
tribe of Judah, that we are apt to forget that it was of 
comparatively recent date. For more than four hundred 
years—a period equal in length to that which elapsed 
between the Norman Conquest and the Wars of the 
R oses —Ephraim, with its two dependent tribes of 
Manasseh and Benjamin, exercised undisputed pre¬ 
eminence. Joshua the first conqueror—Gideon, the 
greatest of the judges, whose brothers were “as the 
children of kings,” and whose children all but established 
hereditary monarchy in their own line—Saul, the first 
king—belonged to one or other of these three tribes. 

Q 


The Moun¬ 
tains of 
Ephraim ; 




226 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


It was not till the close of the first period of Jewish 
history that God “ refused the tabernacle of Joseph, and 
chose not the tribe of Ephraim: but chose the tribe of 
Judah, even the Mount Zion which he loved.” 1 That 
haughty spirit which could brook no equal or superior, 
which chafed against the rise even of the kindred tribe of 
Manasseh in the persons of Gideon and Jephthah, and yet 
more against the growing dominion of Judah in David and 
Solomon, till it threw off the yoke altogether, and esta¬ 
blished an independent kingdom—would naturally claim, 
and could not rightly be refused the choicest portion of the 
land. As “Judah” under Caleb was to “abide in their 
coasts on the south, ” so “the house of Joseph” under 
Joshua was to “ abide in their coasts on the north.” 2 Not 
till these were fixed, could the other tribes be thought of. 
“ For the precious things of heaven, for the dew, and for 
the deep that couch eth beneath, and for the precious fruits 
their ferti- brought forth by the sun, and for the precious things put 
forth by the moon, and for the chief things of the ancient 
mountains, and for the precious things of the lasting hills, 
and for the precious things of the earth, and the fulness 
thereof ... let the blessing come upon the head of Joseph, 
and upon the top of the head of him that was separated 
from his brethren.” 3 If Judah was the wild lion that 
guarded the south, and couched in the fastness of Zion, 
so Ephraim was to be the more peaceful, but not less 
powerful buffalo, who was to rove the rich vales of central 
Palestine, and defend the frontier of the north; “ his 
glory is like the firstling of his bullock, and his horns are 
like the horns of ‘ buffaloes : 5 with them shall he push 
the people together to the ends of the earth, and they are 
the ten thousands of Ephraim, and they are the thousands 
of Manasseh.” 4 In the fulness of their pride and strength, 
they demanded of their great chieftain Joshua, “ Why 
hast thou given me but one lot and one portion to inherit, 
seeing I am a great people, forasmuch as the Lord hath 
blessed me hitherto 5 —the ‘mountain* is not enough for 


1 Ps. lxxviii. 67, 68. 

2 Josh, xviii. 5. 

3 Deut. xxxiii. 13—16. 


pare Gen. i. 22, 28. 


4 Deut. xxxiii. 17. 

5 i. e. by increase of children. Cora- 

4 OO OO 


EPHRAIM AND MANASSEH. 


227 


us/' But Joshua answered them with no less wisdom 
than patriotism, that what more they won must be by 
their own exertions against the Canaanites of the plain : 

“ Thou art a great people, and hast great power: thou 
shalt not have one lot only ; but the mountain shall be 
thine ; for it is a ‘ forest/ and thou shalt cut it down; and 
the outgoings of it shall be thine : for thou shalt drive 
out the Canaanites, though they have iron chariots, and 
though they be strong.” 1 

The “mountain” was theirs—“the mountains of 
Ephraim ”—and to their secure heights even the mem¬ 
bers of other tribes wandered for shelter and for power. 

Ehud the Benjamite, when he armed his countrymen and central 
against Moab, “ blew his trumpet in the mountain of situation. 
Ephraim,” as in the rallying-place of the nation, “ and the 
children of Israel went down with him from the mount 
[into the valley of the Jordan] and he before them.” 2 
Deborah, though, as it would seem, herself 3 of the 
northern tribes, “ dwelt between Ramah and Bethel 4 in 
Mount Ephraim.” Tola, of Issachar, judged Israel in 
Shamir in Mount Ephraim. 5 Samuel, too, was of “fta- 
mathaim-zophim, of Mount Ephraim.” 6 

I. But the connection between the peculiarities of this Shiloh, 
country and its history are, as in Judah, most strikingly 
exemplified by a view of its sacred and capital cities. 

The great sanctuary of the house of Joseph, and during 
the whole period of their supremacy, of the nation also, 
was Shiloh. Perhaps there is no place in Palestine 
that more forcibly exemplifies the remark often made in 
these pages, contrasting the sacred localities of Palestine 
with those of Greece. Delphi, and Lebadea, and the 
Styx are so strongly marked by every accompaniment of 
external nature, as at once to proclaim their position as the 
natural, the inevitable seats of the oracles of the nation. 

But Shiloh is so utterly featureless, that, had it not been 
for the preservation of its name (Seilun), and for the 


1 Joshua, xvii. 14—18, with Ewald’s 
interpretation (2nd edit. i. 87 ii« 
343). 

2 Jud. iii. 27, 28. (See Ewald ii. 362.) 


3 The princes of Issachar with Debo¬ 
rah. Jud. v. 15. 

4 Jud. iv. 5. 5 Jud. x. 1. 

6 1 Sam. i. 1. 

q2 


22 S 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


extreme precision with which its situation is described in 
the Book of Judges, 1 the spot could never have been 
identified; and, indeed, from the time of Jerome till the 
year 1838, its real site was completely forgotten, 2 and its 
name was transferred, as w r e have seen, to that com¬ 
manding height of Gibeon, 3 which a later age naturally 
conceived to be a more congenial spot for the sacred 
place, where for so many centuries w~as “ the tent which 
He had pitched 4 among men,”-— 

“ Our living Dread, who dwells 
In Silo, his bright sanctuary.” 

Its ruins 5 are scattered over a slight eminence which rises 
in one of those softer and wider plains before noticed as 
characteristic of this part of Palestine—a little removed 
from the great central route of the country—its antiquity 
marked by the ruins of the ancient well, probably the 
very one by which the “ daughters of Shiloh ” danced 6 in 
the yearly festival, when the remnant of the neighbouring 
tribe of Benjamin descended from their hills to carry 
them off*—and also by the approach from the east through 
a valley 7 of rock-hewn sepulchres, some of which, in all 
probability, must have been the last resting-place of the 
unfortunate house of Eli. Its selection as the sanctuary 
may partly have arisen from its comparative seclusion, still 
more from its central situation. The most hallowed 
spot of that vicinity, Bethel, which might else have been 
more naturally chosen, was at this time still in the 
hands of the Canaanites; 8 and thus, left to choose 
the encampment of the Sacred Tent, not by old asso¬ 
ciations, but according to the dictates of convenience, 
the conquerors fixed on this retired spot in the heart of 
the country, where the allotment of the territory could 

1 Jud. xxi. 19. 6 Judg. xxi. 19, 21, 23. 

2 See Robinson, iii. 87, 88. 7 gee Robinson, vol. iii. 86. His de- 

3 See Chapter IY. p. 212. scription of this valley, as “ shut in by 

4 Ps. lxxviii. 60. perpendicular walls of rock,” is one of 

5 Mr. Thrupp (Ancient Jerusalem, the very few exaggerations in his 

Note B.) has noticed the curious fact, work. 

that one of these ruins is still called 8 Jud. i. 23—27, with Ewald’s expla- 

by the name of the tomb of the “pro- nation (2nd edit. ii. 363). 
phet Ahijah” the Shilonite. 


EPHRAIM AND MANASSEH. 


229 


be most conveniently made, north, south, east, and west, 
to the different tribes, 1 and there the Ark remained down 
to the fatal day when its home was uprooted by the 
Philistines. But Shiloh, though it was the sanctuary, 
was not the capital, of Ephraim. It was hardly even a 
city in its first origin. It was rather the last halt of the 
many encampments of their past life. The “ tabernacle/' 
“ the tent," that last relic of the nomad existence of the 
chosen people, is the feature always dwelt upon in the 
notices of Shiloh. And with this curiously agrees the 
description of the sanctuary of Shiloh in the Rabbinical 
traditions, 2 as of “ a structure of low stone walls, with the 
tent drawn over the top; ” exactly answering to the 
Bedouin villages of the present day, where the stone 
enclosures often remain, long after the tribes which they 
sheltered, and the tents which they supported, have 
vanished away; the point of transition precisely cor¬ 
responding to the history of the origin of Shiloh, between 
the wandering and the settled life. 

II. It was in a more permanent home that the chiefs of 
the new nation took up their final abode. The situation 
of Shechem is soon described. From the hills through 
which the main route of Palestine must always have run, 
and amongst which Shiloh is secluded, the traveller 
descends into a wide plain—the widest and the most beau¬ 
tiful of the plains of the Ephraimite mountains,—one mass 
of corn, unbroken by boundary or hedge,—from the 
midst of which start up olive-trees, themselves unen¬ 
closed as the fields in which they stand. Over the 
hills which close the northern end of this plain, far away 
in the distance, is caught the first glimpse of the snowy 
ridge of Hermon. Its western side is bounded by the 
abutments of two mountain ranges, running from west to 
east. These ranges are Gerizim and Ebal; and up the 
opening between them, not seen from the plain, lies the 
modern town of Nablous. This is one of the few instances 
in which the Roman, or rather the Greek, name has super¬ 
seded in popular language the ancient Semitic appellation 


Shechf.m. 


1 Joshua, xviii. 1. 


2 Surenhusius’ Mishna, vol. v. 59. 



230 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


—“Nablous” being tlie corruption of “Neapolis,” the “ New 
Town” founded by. Vespasian after the ruin of the older 
Shechem, which probably lay further eastward, and there¬ 
fore nearer to the opening of the valley. 1 A valley, green 
with grass, gray with olives, gardens sloping down on each 
side, fresh springs rushing down in all directions ; at the 
end, a white town embosomed in all this verdure, lodged 
between the two high mountains, which extend on 
each side of the valley—that on the south, Gerizim, that 
on the north, Ebal—this is the aspect of Nablous, 
the most beautiful, perhaps it might be said the only very 
beautiful spot in central Palestine. M. Van de Velde, 
who approached this valley from the richer scenery of the 
north, is not less struck by it than those who contrast it 
with the barren hills of Judaea. “ The awful gorge of the 
Leontes is grand and bold beyond description ; the hills of 
Lebanon, over against Sidon, are magnificent and sublime; 
the valley of the hill of Naphtali is rich in wild oak 
forest and brushwood ; those of Asher, the Wady Kara, 
for example, present a beautiful combination of wood and 
mountain stream in all the magnificence of undisturbed 
originality . . . Carmel, with its wilderness of timber trees 
and shrubs, of plants and bushes, still answers to its 
ancient reputation for magnificence. But the Vale of 
Shechem differs from them all. Here there is no wilder¬ 
ness, here there are no wild thickets, yet there is always 
verdure; always shade, not of the oak, the terebinth, 
and the caroub tree, but of the olive-grove—so soft in 
colour, so picturesque in form, that for its sake we can 
willingly dispense with all other wood. Here there are 
no impetuous mountain torrents, yet there is water— 
water, too, in more copious supplies than anywhere else in 

1 De Saulcy’s arguments (vol. 11. him. He speaks of the name of “ Lou- 
pp. 372—379) founded on the expres- zah,” as given to the ruins of Gerizim 
sions of the Old Testament and Jose- by the Samaritan high-priest at Nablous, 
phus, entirely prove this. But they which certainly agrees with the posi- 
do not establish his position, that the tion at Luza, noticed by Jerome (Ono- 
city was on the summit of Gerizim, masticon: Luza). Can this be the 
and the very graphic description of second Luz, founded by the inhabitants 
Shechem in Theodotus (apud Euseb. of Luz when expelled by the Ephrai- 
Praep. Ev. ix. 22) as “under the roots mites from Bethel ? Jud. i. 26. 
of the mountain,” is decisive against 


EPHRAIM AND MANASSEH. 


231 


the land; and it is just to its many fountains, rills, and 
water-courses that the valley owes its exquisite beauty.” 1 
“ There is a singularity,” he adds, “about the Yale of 
Shechem, and that is the peculiar colouring which objects 
assume in it. You know that wherever there is water, the 
air becomes charged with watery particles; and that distant 
objects, beheld through that medium, seem to be enveloped 
in a pale blue or gray mist, such as contributes not a little 
to give a charm to the landscape. But it is precisely 
these atmospheric tints that we miss so much in Palestine. 
Fiery tints are to be seen both in the morning and the 
evening, and glittering violet or purple-coloured hues 
where the light falls next to the long deep shadows ; but 
there is an absence of colouring, and of that charming 
dusky haze in which objects assume such softly blended 
forms, and in which also the transition in colour from the 
foreground to the farthest distance loses the hardness of 
outline peculiar to the perfect transparency of an eastern 
sky. It is otherwise in the Yale of Shechem, at least in 
the morning and the evening. Here the exhalations 
remain hovering among the branches and leaves of the 
olive-trees, and hence that lovely bluish haze. The 
valley is far from broad, not exceeding in some places a 
few hundred feet. This you find generally enclosed on 
all sides: there likewise the vapours are condensed. 
And so you advance under the shade of the foliage along 
the living waters, and charmed by the melody of a host 
of singing birds—for the}, too, know where to find their 
best quarters—while the perspective fades away, and is 
lost in the damp vapoury atmosphere.” 2 These are the 
features, so unlike to those of Jerusalem, which we have 
now to trace as they burst upon us in different points of 
view through the various stages of the history of Shechem, 
as of a face once familiar, often disappearing, yet again 
and again appearing through the vicissitudes of youth and 
age, through public and private life ; changing, yet still the 


1 Van de Velde, i. 386. 

2 i. 388. These remarks on the 
tnoist atmosphere of Shechem are so 
far confirmed by my own experience, 


that the valley between Nablous and 
Samaria was, when I saw it, wrapt in a 
thick drizzling mist,'such as I saw no¬ 
where else in Syria. 


232 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


First, 
Halting- 
place of 
Abraham. 


First Settle¬ 
ment of 
Jacob. 


same, and connecting events and scenes in themselves 
widely different. ' 

1. It first dawns upon us in the dimness of the Patri¬ 
archal age, as the first spot on which Abraham halted when 
he had crossed 1 2 the Jordan, on his way from Chaldsea, to 
the land which God should give him. It was the “ place of 
Shechem." Shechem itself, it would seem, was not yet built; 
all was still in its primeval state. Yet there was enough of 
those noble groves to attract the wanderer's steps. Under 
the “ 4 terebinths 9 2 of Moreh," now superseded by the more 
useful olive trees, 3 Abraham rested, and built the first 
altar which the Holy Land had known. 

2. What is thus faintly discerned in the life of the earlier 
Patriarch, comes out clearly in the life of his descendant, 
Jacob. From the heights of Gilead, through the deep rent 
of the valley of the Zerka, or Jabbok, which forms one of the 
most remarkable features in the eastward view from the 
summit of Gerizim, Jacob descended with his “two bands," 
—probably by the same route as that through which his 
ancestor, from the same region of Mesopotamia, had 
entered the land. He advanced through the valley, which, 
leading direct from the northern fords of the Jordan, 
opens on the wide corn-plain already described, and 
pitched his tent before the city; and the spot where he 
had at last found a home after his long wanderings, 
became the first possession of himself and his race in 
Palestine. “He bought ‘the' parcel of ‘the' field, where 
he had spread his tent," “of the children of Hamoi*, 
Shechem's father, for an hundred pieces of money." 4 

The wide “ field,"—“ the cultivated field," as it is thus 
distinctively called,—indicates by the mere fact of its 
selection the transition of the Patriarch from the Bedouin 
shepherd into the civilised and agricultural settler. In 
that “ field " he remained. With the prudence character¬ 
istic of his whole life, he never advanced into the narrow 
valley between the mountains, where the city of Shechem 
itself stood ; he and his sons still had their cattle in 


1 Gen. xii. 6, properly “ passed over.” 

2 Gen. xii. 6 : in the E. Vers, “plains 

of Moreh.” See Appendix Elon.) 


3 See Vande Velde, i. 387. 

4 Gen. xxxiii. 19. 


EPHRAIM AND MANASSEH. 


233 


“ the field; ” it was only the rashness of his children 
which drew them into the neighbourhood of the city, 

“ to see the daughters of the land,” and to avenge the 
insult to their house. 1 

3. The same causes which had rendered Shechem and First 
its neighbourhood the primeval possession of Israel in 
Palestine, rendered it naturally the first capital, when his quest, 
descendants, emerging like him from the Bedouin life of 
their desert-wanderings, advanced from the last of their 
tent-encampments at Shiloh to fix themselves as a power¬ 
ful nation in the heart of the country. Its central posi¬ 
tion, and its peculiar fertility, made it the natural seat of 
settled habitation in the north, even to a greater degree 
than the Yale of Mamre and Eshcol ensured, as we have 
seen, the same early privilege for Hebron in the south. 
“Joseph is a fruitful bough, even a fruitful bough by ‘the 
spring ; ' 2 whose branches run over the wall.” This is the 
great benediction of the possession of Jacob's favourite son. 

“ So exceeding verdant and fruitful” (to use the words of 
Maundrell, in whom the sight of this valley awakened 
a connection of thought unusual for himself and his 
age,) “that it may well be looked upon as a standing 
token of the tender affection of that good Patriarch to the 
best of sons.” 3 But besides these natural advantages, the 
place was also consecrated by its ancient sanctuary. It 
was not merely the corn-fields and the valleys, nor even the 
sacred terebinths, nor yet the burial-place of the embalmed 
remains of Joseph, that gave its main interest to Shechem 
in the eyes of a true Israelite. High above the fertile 
vale rose the long rocky ridge of Mount Gerizim, 4 facing 


1 Gen. xxxiv. 1, 7, 26. 

2 Gen. xlix. 22. 

3 Early Travellers, p. 435. 

4 It can hardly be doubted that 
Gesenius (Thes. i. 301) is correct, in de¬ 
riving the name from an ancient tribe, 
of whom only one other trace remains 
in history—the “ Gerizi,” or “ Gerizites,” 
—(1 Sam. xxvii. 8, see the margin of our 
Bibles), probably an Arab horde which 
had once encamped here, as the Amale- 
kites in like manner, who are men¬ 
tioned as their neighbours, gave their 
name to “ the mountain of the Amale- 
kites,” also in the tribe of Ephraim. 


(Jud. v. 14; xii. 15.) “Ebal” is more 
uncertain. Nor is the present aspect 
of the mountain, as compared with 
Gerizim, so barren as to justify its 
derivation from “Ebal” “to strip of 
leaves.” Its modern name (so we were 
told,) is Imad-el-Deen {the “pillar of 
religion”). Dr. Kitto, in his Land of 
Promise (p. 141) states, though with¬ 
out giving his authority, that it is 
called “Sittah Samalyah,” from the 
tomb of a female Mussulman saint. 
There is an account of the ascent of 
Ebal in Bartlett’s Jerusalem, p. 251. 
(See also Ritter, Pal. 640.) 


234 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


Sanctuary 
of Mount 
Gerizim. 


the equally long and rocky range of Ebal. From the 
highest, that is, the eastern summit of that ridge, not 
equal in actual elevation to Jerusalem, but much 
more considerable than the Mount of Olives above the 
level from which it rises, a wide view embraces the 
Mediterranean Sea on the west, the snowy heights of 
Hermon on the north, and on the east the wall of the 
trans-Jordanic mountains, broken by the deep cleft of the 
Jabbok. The mountain that commands this view, which is 
to Ephraim what that from Gibeon, or Olivet, is to Judaea, 
was from very early times a sacred place. It is difficult 
to disentangle the more ancient traditions from those 
which have been accumulated round it by the Samaritans 
of a later age ; but it is in the highest degree probable that 
here, and not at Jerusalem, was the point to which the 
oldest recollections of Palestine pointed as the scene of 
Abraham’s encounter with Melchizedek, and the sacrifice 
of Isaac ; that the smooth sheet of rock on the top of the 
mountain, with the cave beside it, was from the most 
ancient times a seat of primitive worship, and is the most 
authentic remnant of such worship now existing in 
Palestine. It is possible that something similar once 
existed, or may even still exist, on the twin height of 
Ebal. At any rate, these two mountains, with the 
green valley between them, are described as sacred 
places, hovering before the minds of the Israelites, even 
before their entrance into Palestine, and as being at 
once occupied by them with this view, as soon as they 
entered. “ When the Lord thy God hath brought thee in 
unto the land whither thou goest to possess it, . . . thou 
shalt put the blessing upon Mount Gerizim, and the curse 
upon Mount Ebal. Are they not on the other side 
Jordan, .... in the land of the Canaanites, which dwell 
in the ‘ desert* over against Gilgal, under the 4 terebinths * 
of Moreh V n And accordingly, the curses and blessings 

1 Deut. xi. 29, 30. There is an im- spoken of in Deuteronomy and in 
portant passage in Jerome’s work, “ De Joshua, viii. 30—35, and he charges the 
locis Hebraic is/’ (voce Gerizim,) which Samaritans with gross error in having 
distinguishes between the Ebal and confounded them. “Sunt autemjuxta 
Gerizim of Shechem, and the Ebal and Hierichunta duo montes vicini inter se 
Gerizim of the curses and blessings invicem respicientes, e quibus unus Ge- 


EPHRAIM AND MANASSEH. 


235 


are said to have been delivered on this spot in the very 
first days of the entrance, as though they had found their 
way at once from the Valley of the Jordan to this their 
sacred mountain,—“ The border of his sanctuary—the 
mountain which his right hand had purchased.” 1 

With these combined forces of natural advantage and 
religious association, it is not surprising that during the 
whole of the early period of the settlement in Canaan, 
Shechem maintained its hold on the people. It was the 
seat of the chief national assemblies. 2 Within its ancient 
precincts, even after the erection of Jerusalem into the 
capital, the custom was still preserved of inaugurating a 
new reign. “ And Rehoboam went to Shechem : for all 
Israel were come to Shechem to make him king.” 3 

4. One episode in the history of Shechem which took 
place during this period, is recorded in such detail, and is 
so illustrative of all the points we have noticed, that it 
must be briefly mentioned; the narrative of Abimelech's 


rizim, alter Gebel dicitur. Porro Sama- 
ritani arbitrantur hos duos montes 
juxta Neapolim esse, sed vehementer 
errant.” It is certainly a curious fact 
that two mountains were shown as such 
in his time near Jericho, probably part 
of the range of Quarantania; and there 
is at first sight much to be said in 
favour of this position of Ebal and Ge- 
rizim. 1. The wide interval between 
the two mountains at Shechem is (as 
Jerome remarks) difficult to reconcile 
with the statement, that the words were 
heard across the valley from east to 
west. “Plurimum inter se distant; 
nec possent invicem benedicentium sive 
maledicentium inter se audiri voces.” 
2. The mention of Gilgal in close con¬ 
nection with the mountains, first in 
Deut. xi. 30, and then by implication, in 
Joshua, viii. 30 (compare v. 10 and ix. 
6) where the ceremony is described 
as taking place immediately after the 
conquest of Ai, naturally leads us to 
look for the mountains in the neigh¬ 
bourhood of Jericho; and the expres¬ 
sion of the Hebrew text, “that dwell 
in the desert ” (Arabah, mistranslated 
“champaign,”) can only be applied 
to the valley of the Jordan. But on 
the other hand these words are 
omitted in the LXX; and the positive 


statement that the mountains were by 
the terebinths of Moreh, compels us to 
adhere to the common views. The 
mention of Gilgal in Deut. xi. 30, is 
probably introduced in reference to the 
scene of the discourse of Moses on the 
east of Jordan; and in Joshua, viii. 30, 
there is nothing to prevent the notion 
that the Israelites may have marched 
at once for that one purpose from Ai 
to Shechem. (See Chapter IV.) In the 
LXX, the narrative is slightly trans¬ 
posed. The difficulty about the voice 
may perhaps be solved by the supposi¬ 
tion that the ceremony took place on the 
lower spurs of the mountains where 
they approach more nearly to each 
other—and it is not greater than on 
any hypothesis attaches to the similar 
statement respecting Jotham’s speech 
in Jud. ix. 7. (See Buckingham’s Pa¬ 
lestine, ii. 470.) 

1 Ps. lxxviii. 54. Such at least seems 
the most probable explanation accord¬ 
ing to the context. (Compare also 
Exodus xv. 17.) 

2 Joshua, xxiv. i. 25. 

3 1 Kangs xii. 1. (Compare the long 
continuance of Rheims, the ancient 
metropolitan city of France, as the 
scene of the French coronations.) 


Insurrec¬ 
tion of 
Abimelecli. 


236 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


Sanctuary 
of the 
Samaritan 
sect. 


conspiracy to make himself king; the formation of 
the league of cities, under the protection of Baal- 
Berith, the 4 god of the league/ and the insurrection 
of the original Canaanites of Shechem against the con¬ 
querors. 1 The address of Jotham “ on the top of Mount 
Gerizim,” 2 as the public or sacred place of Shechem ; the 
parable drawn from the rivalry of the various trees, 3 4 so 
appropriate to the diversified foliage of the valley 
below ; the adjacent forest of Mount Zalmon ; 4 the tere¬ 
binths of Jacob ; 5 the “ field” before the city ; 6 the 
“shadows of the mountain tops;” 7 are all features more 
or less characteristic of the neighbourhood. This is the 
last appearance of the primitive Shechem in the Jewish 
history. It was razed to the ground by Abimelech, 8 
and the place is no more mentioned till its revival in the 
monarchy. 

5. There is no occasion to dwell on the revival of Shechem 
as the capital of the northern kingdom under Jeroboam, 
or on its subsequent features as the seat of the mixed 
settlers after the return from the exile, commonly called 
Samaritans. Yet it is interesting to remember that, 
through all these vicissitudes, Gerizim, the oldest 
sanctuary in Palestine, retained its sanctity to the end. 
There is probably no other locality, in which the same 
worship has been sustained with so little change or inter¬ 
ruption for so great a series of years as that of this 
mountain, from Abraham to the present day. In their 
humble synagogue, at the foot of the mountain, the 
Samaritans still worship,— the oldest and the smallest 
sect in the world ; distinguished by their noble phy¬ 
siognomy and stately appearance from all other branches 


1 See the explanations of Jud. ix., by 
Patrick; and by Ewald (2nd edit. ii. 444 
—448.) 

2 Jud. ix. 7. 

3 Jud. ix. 8. 

4 Jud. ix. 48. It is possible that Zal¬ 
mon may be another name for Ebal. 
At any rate it must have been near. 
The name occurs only once again. Ps. 
Ixviii. 14. 

a Jud. ix. 37. “ The plain of Meo- 

nenim ”=the terebinth of enchant¬ 


ments. Compare Chapter II. viii. p. 
141, note. 

6 Jud. ix. 32, 42, 43; in 27 and 44, 
wrongly translated ‘‘fields.” 

7 Jud. ix. 36. 

8 Jud. ix. 45. The site of the city thus 
destroyed by Abimelech was shown in 
Jerome’s time near Joseph's sepulchre 
(De locis Hebraicis : voce Sichem). 
This, however, was more likely the 
site of the city destroyed before the 
building of Neapolis. 



EPHRAIM AND MANASSEH. 


237 


of the Jewish race. In their prostrations at the elevation 
of their revered copy of the “Pentateuch,” they throw 
themselves on their faces in the direction, not of Priest or 
Law, or any object within the building, but obliquely 
towards the eastern summit of Mount Gerizim. And up 
the side of the mountain, and on its long ridge, is to he 
traced the pathway by which they ascend to the sacred 
spots where they yearly celebrate, alone of all the Jewish 
race, the Paschal Sacrifice. 1 

6. One more scene remains which supplies to this portion Jacob’i 
of Palestine associations like those which Olivet and WelL 
Bethany supply to Judsea, and which sums up in so re¬ 
markable a manner all the successive points presented in 
the history of Shechem, that often as it has been depicted, 
it must briefly be told again. At the mouth of the Valley 
of Shechem, two slight breaks are visible in the midst of 
the vast plain of corn—one a white Mussulman chapel; 
the other a few fragments of stone. The first of these 
covers the alleged tomb of Joseph, buried thus in the 
‘parcel of ground 5 which his father bequeathed especially 
to him, his favourite son. 2 The second marks the undis¬ 
puted site of the well, now neglected and choked up by 
the ruins which have fallen into it; but still with every 
claim, to be considered the original well, sunk deep into 
the rocky ground, by “ our father Jacob,” who had 
retained enough of the customs of the earlier families 
of Abraham and Isaac, to mark his first possession by 
digging a well, “to give drink thereof to himself, his 
children, and his cattle/ 5 3 This at least was the tradition 


1 See note at the end of the Chapter. 
The great period of Samaritan power 
must have been in the 6th century, 
when they appeared on the coasts of 
the Mediterranean, generally as engaged 
with the Jews in the slave-trade of 
Europe, and when money-changer and 
Samaritan were used as convertible 
terms. It was then that they rose in 
insurrection agaiust the Christians in 
Neapolis—and that in consequence a 
church dedicated to the Virgin Mary 
was built on the summit of Gerizim, 
and fortified by Justinian. . (See Mil- 
man’s History of Jews, vol. iii. pp. 215, 
221—229.) 


2 Josh. xxiv. 32. Compare Gen. 
xlviii. 22. See the Map, p. 224. 

3 John iv. 12. There are two chapels 
shown as the Tomb of Joseph; one, that 
which is here mentioned, close to the 
well, which has nothing worthy of re¬ 
mark except the fact that the tomb 
(unlike those of most Mussulman saints) 
is built diagonally across the floor of the 
chapel. The other, also a Mussulman 
chapel, is about a quarter of a mile up 
the valley on the slope of Mount Geri¬ 
zim, and is said by the Samaritans to be 
so called after a Rabbi Joseph of Na- 
blous. There can be no doubt that the 
well now shown is the one which has 


238 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


of the place, in the last days of the Jewish people, and 
its position adds probability to the conclusion, indica¬ 
ting, as has been well observed, 1 that it was there dug 
by one who could not trust to the fresh springs so 
near in the adjacent vale, which still belonged to the 
hostile or strange Canaanites. If this be so, we have 
here an actually existing monument of the prudential 
character of the old Patriarch ; as though we saw him 
administering the mess of pottage, or compassing his ends 
with Laban, or guarding against the sudden attack of Esau; 
fearful lest he “ being few in number, the inhabitants of 
the land should gather themselves together against him, 
and slay him and his house/' 2 By a singular fate, this 
authentic and expressive memorial of the earliest dawn 
of Jewish history became the memorial no less 
authentic and expressive of its Sacred close. Of all the 
special localities of our Lord’s life in Palestine, this is 
almost the only one absolutely undisputed. By the 
edge of this well, in the touching language of 
the ancient hymn, “ Quaerens me, sedisti lassus.” Here, 
on the great road through which “ He must needs go ” 
when “He left Judaea, and departed into Galilee,” He 
halted, as travellers still halt, in the noon 3 or evening 
of the spring-day by the side of the well, amongst the 
relics of a former age. Up that passage through the 
valley, His disciples “ went away into the city,” which 
He did not enter. Down the same gorge came the 
woman to draw water, according to the unchanged 
custom of the East, which still, in the lively concourse 
of veiled figures round the wayside wells, reproduces 
the image of Rebekah, and Rachel, and Zipporah. 4 
Above them, as they talked, rose “this mountain” of 
Gerizim, crowned by the Temple, of which the vestiges still 
remain, where the fathers of the Samaritan sect “ said 


always been pointed out as Jacob’s 
well. But it may be worth observing 
that its later association bas caused 
it sometimes to be called the well of 
the Samaritan—Bir-es-Samaria; whilst 
another well within the town is some¬ 
times known by the name of Jacob’s 


well—Bir-el-Jacoub. (Buckingham, 543, 
544.) 1 Robinson, iii. p. 112. 

2 Gen. xxxiv. 30. 

3 John iv. 2, 3, 6. According as we 
make the hours of St. John’s Gospel, 
by the Roman or our own reckoning. 

4 See Chap. II. p. 146. 

* 


EPHRAIM AND MANASSEH. 

men ought to worship,” and to which, still after so many 
centuries, their descendants turn as to the only sacred 
spot in the universe: the strongest example of local 
worship now existing in the world in the very face of the 
declaration there uttered, that all local worship should 
cease. And round about them, as He and she thus sate 
or stood by the well, spread far and wide the noble plain 
of waving corn. 1 It was still winter, or early spring, 2 — 
“ four months yet to the harvest; ” and the bright 
golden ears of those fields had not yet “ whitened ” their 
unbroken expanse of verdure. But as He gazed upon 
them, they served to suggest the glorious vision of the 
distant harvest of the Gentile world, which, with each 
successive turn of the conversation, unfolded itself more 
and more distinctly before Him, as He sate (so we gather 
from the narrative) absorbed in the opening prospect, 
silent amidst His silent and astonished disciples. 3 

III. Jerusalem and Shechem are the only ancient cities 
which have reached the dignity of capitals of Palestine. 
And, as in Judah no rival city ever rose till the time of 
the Herods, the whole splendour of the southern monarchy 
was concentrated in Jerusalem, and contributed to that 
magnificence which has before been described as probably 
excelling any sight of the kind within the Holy Land. 
But in the northern kingdom, the sovereigns followed the 
tendency similar to that which has guided princes of all 
times to build sumptuous palaces, and select pleasant 
residences, apart from the great seats of state. This 
difference between the two kingdoms was doubtless in 
part occasioned by the stronger hold which the City of 
David possessed on the minds both of princes and people, 
than could be the case in the less firmly established 
monarchy of Shechem. But it would also be fostered by 
the difference between the two regions. Except Hebron 
there was no spot to which a king of Judah would 

1 Most of the points in this interview in April or May. I left the great 

are well brought out by Clarke (iv. plain of Philistia on the 1st of May, 
p, 80.) and the corn was still standing. 

2 Robinson (Harmony, p. 189,) fixes 3 “His disciples . . . marvelled . . . 
it in November or December; but yet no man said, What seekest thou ? ” 
rather it should be in January or John iv. 27. 

February. The harvest of Palestine is 


239 


Samaria. 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


240 


naturally be attracted, either by the beauty or the fertility 
of its situation. The new capital which Herod founded for 
the Roman province of Judaea, under the name of Caesarea, 
was created with an especial view to intercourse with the 
west, which in early times had no existence. But in the 
territory of Ephraim, the fertile plains, and to a certain 
extent wooded hills, which have been often noticed as its 
characteristic ornaments, at once gave an opening to the 
formation of parks and pleasure-grounds similar to those 
which were the “ Paradises ” of Assyrian and Persian 
monarchs. One of these was Tirzah, of unknown site, but 
its beauty, evidently near Shechem, and of proverbial beauty, 1 selected 
by the first sovereign, Jeroboam, 2 and then during three 
short reigns the habitual residence of the royal house. 3 
Another was Jezreel during the reign of Ahab, of which I 
shall speak hereafter. But the chief was Samaria. Six 
miles from Shechem, following the course of the same 
green and watered valley, the traveller finds himself 
in a wide basin, encircled with hills, on a lower level than 
the Valley of Shechem, and almost on the edge of the 
great maritime plain. In the centre of this basin rises 
an oblong hill, with steep yet accessible sides, and a long 
flat top. This was “ the mountain Shomron,” (corrupted 
through the Chaldee “Shemrin” into the Greek “Samaria,”) 
which Omri bought of Shemer for the great sum of two 
talents of silver, “and built on the mountain, and called the 
name of the city which he built, Shomron (or Samaria), 
after the name of Shemer owner of the mountain.” 4 What 
Omri in all probability built as a mere palatial residence, 
became the capital of the kingdom instead of Shechem. 
It was as though Versailles had taken the place of Paris, 


1 “ Thou art beautiful, 0 my love, 
as Tirzah.” Cant. vi. 4. The word for 
“ beautiful ” ( jafeli) is the same word 
as that which gave its name to “ Jaffa ” 
or “Joppa.” In this passage it would 
seem to be contrasted with comely 
— (naveh )—which appeal's to answer 
to the Latin decens, and the Greek 
aefjLvos. “ I am black but comely.” 
Cant. i. 5. In Ps. xlviii. 2, however, 
jafeh is applied to the elevation of Jeru¬ 
salem. Schwarze (p. 150) speaks of a 


“ Tarza ” on a high mount east of Sa¬ 
maria. 

2 1 Kings xiv. 17. 

3 1 Kings xv. 21; xvi. 8, 17, 23. 

4 1 Kings xvi. 24. The word sig¬ 
nifies watch-tower, and, if it were not for 
the derivation (in this case indispu¬ 
table, and therefore not unimportant, 
as throwing light on more doubtful 
instances) from the owner, might have 
been thought to be due to the appro¬ 
priateness of the situation. 


EPHRAIM AND MANASSEH. 


241 


or Windsor of London. But in this case the change was 
effected by the admirable choice of Omri in selecting a 
position which, as has been truly observed, combined in a 
union not elsewhere found in Palestine, strength, beauty, 
and fertility. Its fertility and beauty it shared to a 
great extent with Shechem, in this respect the common 
characteristic of these later capitals, all probably alike 
included in the bitter praise of the prophet, “ Woe to the 
crown of pride, to the drunkards of Ephraim,—whose 
glorious beauty is a fading flower,—which are on the 
head of the fat ‘ ravines 9 of them that are overcome 
with wine.” 1 But having these advantages which its 
Shechem had, it had others which Shechem had not. strengtl1. 
Situated on its steep height, in a plain itself girt in by 
hills, it was enabled, not less promptly than Jerusalem, to 
resist the successive assaults made upon it by the Syrian 
and Assyrian armies. The first were baffled altogether ; 
the second took it only after a three years’ siege, that is 
three times as long as that which reduced Jerusalem. 2 
The local circumstances of the earlier sieges are well 
brought out by M. Van de Velde. 3 “ As the mountains 
around the hill of Shemer are higher than that hill itself, 
the enemy must have been able to discover clearly the 
internal condition of the besieged Samaria. . . . The 
inhabitants, whether they turned their eyes upwards or 
downwards to the surrounding hills, or into the valley, 
must have seen all full of enemies . . . thirty and two 
kings, and horses and chariots. The mountains and the 
adjacent circle of hills, were so densely occupied by the 
enemy, that not a man could pass through to bring provi¬ 
sions to the beleaguered city. The Syrians on the hills must 
have been able from where they stood plainly to dis¬ 
tinguish the famishing inhabitants.” On that beautiful 
eminence, looking far over the plain of Sharon and the 
Mediterranean Sea, to the west, and over its own fertile 
vale to the east, the kings of Israel reigned in a luxury 
which, for the very reason of its being like that of 
more Eastern sovereigns, was sure not to be permanent in 


3 i. 376, 377. See 1 Kings xx. 13—16; 
2 Kings vi. 24—33. 


1 Isa. xxviii. 1. 

2 2 Kings xviii. 10. 


242 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


Sebaste. 


The Passes 
of Ma- 
nasseh. 


a race destined for higher purposes. The vast temple 
of Baal was there erected, which Jehu destroyed; and 
in later times, Herod chose it alone out of the ancient 
capitals of the north, to adorn with the name and with 
the temple of Augustus, from which time it assumed the 
appellation, which with a slight change it has borne ever 
since, “ Sebaste.” And now, although its existence 
has but been brought fully to light within the last 
few years, it is the only site in Palestine, besides Jeru¬ 
salem, which exhibits relics of ancient architectural 
beauty. The long colonnade of the broken pillars of 
Herod’s city, still lines the topmost terrace of the hill; 
and the gothic ruin of the church of St. John the 
Baptist, parent of the numerous churches which bear his 
name throughout the West, remains over what Christians 
and the Mussulman inhabitants still revere as the 
grave “of the Prophet John, son of Zacharias,” 1 round 
which in the days of Jerome the same wild orgies were 
performed which are now to he seen round “ the Holy 
Sepulchre.” 2 The doubtful tradition, which thus links 
together on the summit of Samaria the names of the 
Baptist and his murderer, is amongst the very few solemn 
recollections which attach to this spot. It is possible that 
the reservoir which still exists in the precincts of that 
edifice, half church half mosque, may be the “ pool ” in 
which the chariot of Ahab was washed, which had 
brought up the dying king from the Valley of the 
Jordan, after the fatal fight of Ramoth-Gilead. 3 But 
there is no place of equal eminence in Palestine, with 
so few great recollections. Compared with Shechem or 
Jerusalem, it is a mere growth of pleasure and con¬ 
venience—the city of luxurious princes, not of patriarchs 
and prophets, priests and kings. 

IV. As the central hills of Palestine terminate on the 
east and west in the maritime plain and the Valley of the 
Jordan, so on the north they descend through long broken 
passes to the edge of the great plain of Esdraelon. Valleys 
of considerable depth, though never contracted to defiles, 

1 This is the name by which the 2 Sec Chapter XIV. 

rude inhabitants of the present town 3 Kings xxii. 88. 

of Sebastieh point out the tomb. 


EPHRAIM AND MANASSEH. 


243 


lead down from one to the other. Here and there they 
open into a wider upland plain. One such is that called 
the Plain of Sanur, 1 out of which rise, like the isolated rocks 
from the Carse of Stirling, several steep hills, the most 
commanding summit being crowned by the strong 
fortress of Sanur. Through these passes, occasionally 
guarded by strongholds, the lines of communication 
must have run between the north and the south : 
in these passes, “the horns of Joseph, the ten thousands 
of Ephraim, 2 and the thousands of Manasseh,” were to 
repulse the invaders from the north. Manasseh, extending 
along the whole of this long ridge, and then stretching 
across the Jordan to join the pastoral division of the same 
tribe, which reached into the distant hills of Bashan and 
Gilead, was the frontier and the outpost of Ephraim. Of 
the eastern portion there will be another occasion to speak. 
But the chief historical importance of the western portion 
lies in its occupation of the Passes of Esdraelon. They 
are very little known ; and in speaking of them, almost 
all travellers are compelled to draw conclusions from 
the one well-known descent from Sebaste through Sanur 
to Jenin. But the general nature of the ground cannot 
be doubted. Whenever the plain of Esdraelon has been 
occupied by hostile forces, it must have been from the hills 
of Manasseh that they were overlooked. On this turns 
the whole history of the great hero of Manasseh, Gideon, 
who amongst these hills was raised up to descend on the 
Midianite host. Hence, too, in the strange mixture of truth 
and fiction contained in the Apocryphal book of Judith, the 
whole stress of the defence of Palestine against Holofernes 
is laid on the same tribe ; they were “charged to keep 
the passages of the hill country, for by them there w r as an 
entrance into Judsea, and it was easy to stop them that 
would come up, because the passage was strait for two 
men at the most/' 3 A pass so narrow as is here inti¬ 
mated probably does not exist in this part of Palestine. 
But the general effect of the description is correct; and 
although Bethulia, the city besieged by Holofernes, is 

1 It is sometimes erroneously called 2 Deut. xxxiii. 17. 

tlie plain of Sharon. 3 Judith iv. 7. ^ 


244 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


unknown , 1 perhaps even a mere invention, yet there is one 
place mentioned as the point on which all the defences 
turned, and of which the notices agree with those in other 
parts of the Jewish history, namely, Dothain. This now 
appears to have been identified by the modern name of 
Dotan, a little on the west of what is now the usual 
descent on the plain from the hills . 2 Its first appear¬ 
ance—not, however, without some doubt—is in the story 
of Joseph. He left “the ‘ valley ' of Hebron”—sought 
his brothers at Shechem—heard of them from a man 
in the cultivated “ field,” so often mentioned—and found 
them at Dothain, or “ the Two Wells.” Into one of 
these wells, as it would seem, his brethren cast him, 
when, coming up from Esdraelon, they saw the Arabian 
merchants on their way from the mountains beyond the 
Jordan join the great Egyptian route along the maritime 
plain . 3 The next appearance is more certain. At Dothain, 
or (as it is here written, in a contracted form) Dothan, 
Elisha was living , 4 when the Syrian army with its chariots 
and horses came up, no doubt from Esdraelon, on its way 
to Samaria. 


1 It may possibly be the fortress of 
Sanur, mentioned above. 

2 Such is the statement of M. Van de 
Velde. He describes it as a knoll, 
covered with ruins—the ruins of an 
aqueduct—a flat grass field round it. 
(i. 364—368.) 

3 Gen. xxxvii. 12—28. The tradi¬ 
tional scene of Joseph’s adventures is 
in the plain of the upper Jordan, im¬ 
mediately north of the Lake of Gen- 
nesareth, and its site marked by an 
ancient khan, bearing his name, “ Khan 
Yusuf,” as its neighbourhood is by the 

‘‘Bridge of the Daughters of Jacob,” 
over the river, and its consequences, 
by the black and white stones on the 


shores of the lake, said to be the marks 
of Jacob’s tears. (See Chapter II.) But 
there is no trace there of the name of 
Dothan, nor does it so well agree with 
the rest of the story; and the whole 
cycle of local tradition may have grown 
up from the belief of later times, that 
Joseph lived and died in the holy city 
of Safed, which is in the centre of that 
region. One expression, however, sug¬ 
gests a doubt whether, after all, it is 
not the place. The pit of Joseph was 
“ in the wilderness .” (Gen. xxxvii. 22.) 
This word might, as in the Gospels, 
be applied to the desert-valley of 
the Jordan—hardly to the valleys of 
Samaria. 4 2 Kings vi. 13. 


EPHRAIM AND MANASSEH. 


245 


NOTE. 

MOUNT GERIZIM. 

Two complete accounts have been given of Mount Gerizim,—one 
by Dr. Eobinson,' who saw it in 1838, the other by M. De Saulcy, 1 2 3 
who saw it in 1851. It is needless, therefore, here to do more than 
briefly enumerate the main objects of interest; and this the more, 
as a work is shortly expected from the pen of Mr. Eogers, the 
English Vice-Consul at Caipha, who has probably seen more of the 
Samaritan sect, and of their worship, than any other European. I 
have ventured here and there to add a few confirmations or illus¬ 
trations of my remarks from the mouth of his Samaritan friend 
Jacob-es-Shellaby. 

The mountain is ascended by two well-worn tracks, one leading 
from the town of Nablous at its western extremity, the other from 
the valley on its northern side, near one of the two spots pointed 
out as Joseph's tomb. It is on the eastern extremity of the ridge 
that the "holy places" of the Samaritans are collected. Eirst, 
there occurs the small hole in the rocky ground where the lamb is 
roasted on the evening of the Passover; 3 next, the large stone 
structure, supposed by M. De Saulcy to be the remains of the 
Samaritan temple, and by Dr. Eobinson to be the ruins of the 
fortress of Justinian; but in either case occupying the site of the 
ancient temple. In one of the towers of this edifice, on the north¬ 
east angle, is the tomb of a Mussulman saint, Sheykh Ghranem. 4 
Under the southern wall of this castle or temple, is a line of rocky 
slabs, called the "ten stones," in commemoration of the ten (or 
twelve) stones brought by Joshua, or of the ten tribes of the 
northern kingdom. De Saulcy supposes them to be artificial, and 
erected by Joshua. But they have every appearance of a large 
rocky platform; the twelve (for there are twelve distinctly marked) 
divided each from each by natural fissures. It was also pointed 
out to him as the "burning-place" of the victims (Harakah). 
Beyond this platform, and still further to the east, is a smooth 
surface of rock, sloping down to a hole on its south side. The 
rock, according to the present story, is the holy place—the scene 
of Abraham's sacrifice—the Bethel of Jacob—the spot where the 
Ark rested; the hole in the Holy of Holies. But it can hardly be 

1 B. R. iii. p. 124. in Notices of the Modern Samaritans, 

2 Journey in Syria, ii. 370. p. 25. 

3 The whole scene of the Samaritan 4 The same name was reported to us as 

Passover is given in detail by Mr. Rogers to De Saulcy, ii. 367. 


246 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


Meeting 
with Mel- 
chizedek. 


doubted that it is the original sanctuary; 1 2 and that the hole is an 
aperture for the sewerage of the blood of victims; and it thus 
furnishes an illustration of the threshing-floor of Araunah, on 
which the altar of David and Solomon was built, with the cavity 8 
underneath for the reception of the blood and garbage. 

I have stated that there is every probability that Gerizim, and 
not Jerusalem, is the scene of two of the most remarkable events in 
the history of Abraham.. 

1. The meeting with Melchizedek (Gen xiv. 17, 18,) is expressly 
stated in the fragment of Theodotus preserved by Eusebius, to have 
occurred in “ Ar-Gerizim,” the “ mountain of the Most High/” 3 It 
is clear that this, as in the analogous case of Ar-Mageddon, is 
simply the Greek version of “the mountain of Gerizim,” the 
uniform mode of designating that eminence. So I observed that 
Jacob-es-Shellaby always called it “Ar-Gerizim” in Arabic. That 
it should have been thus early set apart as the “ mountain of the 
Most High ” is natural, from the commanding appearance which 
it presents, especially as seen from the plain of Philistia and 
Sharon,, up which, in all probability, the old Gerizites, from whom 
it derives its name, must have swept from the Desert. And its 
elevation above the neighbouring hills is so great as naturally to 
deserve the supremacy which Josephus gives it, of “the highest 
of all the mountains of Samaria.” 4 

This traditional selection of Gerizim as the scene of the meeting 
with Melchizedek is further confirmed by all the circumstances of 
the narrative. Abraham was returning from his victory over the 
eastern kings at Dan, at the head of the Valley of the Jordan, when 
he was welcomed by the king* of Sodom “ at the valley of Shaveh, 
which is the king’s f valley/ ” or, as the Septuagint renders it, 
“ of the kings,” probably in allusion to this very meeting. 5 This 
valley is mentioned once again expressly as “the king’s valley,” 
where Absalom had erected his tomb. 6 It was conjectured in later 
times, that this valley was the ravine of the Kedron on the east of 
Jerusalem; and this conjecture has been perpetuated by the name 
of Absalom’s tomb attached to the most conspicuous of the monu¬ 
ments in that ravine. But the context in both places leads to the 
conclusion that the place was somewhere near the Valley of the 
Jordan, probably on its eastern side, where the death of Absalom 
occurred, and where it would therefore be mentioned as a singular 


1 See Chapter III. 

2 To us, as to M. de Saulcy, a niche or 
apse in the “castle” was shown as the 
“Kibleh” of the Samaritans. But this 
probably was merely from the Mussulman 
guide’s association of such a spot with the 
niche of the “ Mihrab ” in mosques. 

3 Euseb. Prsep. Ev. ix. 22. 

4 Ant. XI. viii. 2. 


6 Gen. xiv. 17. Josephus calls it veSiov 
&acri\e?ov (Ant. I. x. 2), an expression 
which he could never have applied to the 
Valley of Jehoshaphat. On the other 
hand (in Ant. VII. x. 3), in speaking of 
Absalom’s tomb, he calls it Kol\as fia- 
o-iAikt), and speaks of it as only three 
stadia from Jerusalem. 

2 Sam. xviii. 18. 


EPHRAIM AND MANASSEH. 


247 


coincidence that he had erected his monument near the scene of his 
end. The only other occasion on which the word “ Shaveh” is used 
(meaning, apparently, a dale, or level, space), occurs in these same 
parts in the northern extremity of Moab, “Shaveh-Kiriathaim.” 1 In 
such a level space in one of the valleys, Abraham would naturally be 
met by the grateful king of Sodom. And at this same spot would 
also appear the king of the neighbouring town of Salem, of which 
the name occurs again in the same vicinity in the history of Jacob; 
then again, after a long interval, in Judith iv. 4, then in the 
history of John the Baptist, and still lingers in a village seen 
from the summit of Gerizim in the valley which leads out of the 
plain of Shechem towards the Jordan. 2 He was king of Salem, 
and priest of the Most High God—that is, according to the above- 
mentioned tradition, of the God who was worshipped on the summit 
of Gerizim—and to him as the royal guardian and minister of the 
most ancient and conspicuous sanctuary of Palestine, Abraham paid 
the tenth of the recently acquired spoil. 

2. What is affirmed by the Gentile tradition with regard to the 
connection of Gerizim with Melchizedek, is affirmed by the Samaritan 
tradition with regard to its connection with the sacrifice of Isaac. 
The Jewish tradition, as represented by Josephus, transfers the scene 
to the hill on which the temple was afterwards erected at Jerusalem, 
and this belief has been perpetuated in Christian times as attached 
to a spot in the garden of the Abyssinian Convent, not indeed on 
Mount Moriah, but immediately to the east of the Church of the 
Holy Sepulchre, with the intention of connecting the sacrifice of Isaac 
with the Crucifixion. An ancient thorn tree, covered with the rags 
of pilgrims, is still shown as the thicket in which the ram was caught. 
But the Samaritan tradition is here again confirmed by the circum¬ 
stances of the story. Abraham was “ in the land of the Philistines,” 
probably at the extreme south. Prom Beersheba or Gaza he would 


1 Gen. xiv. 5. See Appendix, Shaveh. 

2 That this was the Salem of Melchi¬ 
zedek is maintained by Jerome, in whose 
time large ruins were shown there, bearing 
the name of “ Melchizedek’s Palace,” and 
more doubtfully by Epiphanius (Adv. 
Hser. ii. p. 469), who, however, speaks 
of its situation exactly where it is now 
shown, in the plain opposite Shechem. 
The other, and now more popular tradi¬ 
tion, which Epiphanius describes as exist¬ 
ing in his time, and which is also adopted by 
Suidas (voce Melchizedek), supposes Salem 
to have been the ancient name of Jebus, 
and that the subsequent application of 
this name to the Holy City was merely a 
revival of its ancient appellation. In 
favour of this belief, is :—1. The fact that 
Jerusalem is once so called, in Psalm 


lxxvi. 2.—2. The authority of Josephus 
(Ant. I. x. 2), who expressly identifies 
the Salem of Melchizedek with Jerusalem. 
—3. The incidental confirmation of it in 
the name of -Melchizedek (the King of 
Righteousness)—which might seem to be 
the natural precursor of Adonizedek (the 
Lord of Righteousness), king of Jebus 
in the time of Joshua. But the concur¬ 
rence of testimonies and probabilities is 
decidedly in favour of the northern Salem, 
and there is no trace of any belief to the 
contrary in the Scriptures themselves. 
Jerome inclined to the belief that Jacob’s 
Salem was Shechem itself, though he men¬ 
tions another near Scythopolis, and also one 
on the west of Jerusalem. The Samaritan 
tradition fixes Melchizedek’s abode to 
some spot on the eastward of Nablous. 


Sacrifice of 
Isaac. 


248 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


probably be conceived to move' along the Philistine plain, and then 
on the morning of the third day would arrive in the plain of Sharon, 
exactly where the massive height of Gerizim is visible “ afar off,” 
and from thence half a day would bring him to its summit. Exactly 
such a view is to be had in that plain; 1 and, on the other hand, no 
such view or impression can fairly be said to exist on the road from 
Beersheba to Jerusalem, even if what is at most a journey of two 
days could be extended to three. The towers of Jerusalem are indeed 
seen from the ridge of Mar Elias, at the distance of three miles; 
but there is no elevation, nothing corresponding to the “ place afar 
off ” to which Abraham “ lifted up his eyes.” And the special 
locality which Jewish tradition has assigned for the place, and whose 
name is the chief guarantee for the tradition—Mount Moriah—the 
Hill of the Temple—is not visible till the traveller is close upon it, at 
the southern edge of the Yalley of Hinnom, from whence he looks 
down upon it, as on a lower eminence. And when from the cir¬ 
cumstances we pass to the name, the argument based upon it in 
favour of Jerusalem is at least equally balanced by the argument 
which it yields in favour of Gerizim. The name of Moriah, as 
applied to the Temple hill, refers to the vision to David after the 
plague. “ Solomon began to build the house in the Mount of f the 
appearance of the Lord' (Moriah), where He appeared unto David 
his father.” 2 Some such play on the word is apparent also in 
Gen. xxii. 8, 14, where the same Hebrew word is employed, “ God 
will see” —“in the mountain the Lord shall see” ‘(Jehovah jireh). 
But in the case of the mountain of Abraham's sacrifice, it was 
probably in the first instance derived from its conspicuous position, 
as “ seen from afar off; ” and the name was thus applied not merely 
to “ one of the mountains,” but to the whole “ land ” 3 —an expres¬ 
sion entirely inapplicable to the contracted eminence of the temple. 
The LXX, moreover, evidently unconscious of its identification with 
the Mount of J erusalem, translate it, t rjv yrjv rrjv v\jrT]\riv, “ the 
high land,”—a term exactly agreeing with the appearance which 
the hills of Ephraim, and especially Gerizim, present to a traveller 
advancing up the Philistine plain, and also with the before-mentioned 
expression of Theodotus—“ the mountain of the Most High.” It 
is impossible here not to ask whether a trace of the name of 
Moriah, as applied to Gerizim and its neighbourhood, may not be 
found in the term “ Moreh,” applied to the grove of terebinths 
in the same vicinity, in Gen. xii. 6, of which the same transla¬ 
tion is given by the LXX, as of Moriah— rr\v bpvv rrjv vy/rrjXriv, 
“the high oak.” Hebrew scholars must determine how far the 
difference of the radical letters of mo and miD is an insuperable 
objection to the identification. In Gen. xxii. the Samaritans actually 
read Moreh for Moriah. 

1 See Chapter VI. ^ 2 Chron. lii. 1. ^ Gen. xxii. 2. 


CHAPTER VI. 

- ♦ - 

THE MARITIME PLAIN. 

Zeph. ii. 5, 6, 7. “ Woe unto the inhabitants of the sea coasts, the na¬ 
tion of the Cherethites! the word of the Lord is against you; 0 Canaan, 
the land of the Philistines, I will even destroy thee, that there shall be 
no inhabitant. And the sea coast shall be dwellings and ‘cisterns’ for 
shepherds, and folds for flocks. And the coast shall be for the remnant 
of the house of Judah; they shall feed thereupon.” 

Judges v. 17. “ Why did Dan remain in ships V ’ 

Isaiah lxv. 10. “Sharon shall be a fold of flocks.” 

Acts ix. 35. “ All that dwelt in Lydda and Saron .... turned unto 

the Lord.” 

Judges v. 17. “ Asher continued on the sea shore, and abode in his 

‘ creeks.’ ” 

Ezek. xxvii. 3, 4. “ 0 Tyrus . . . thy borders are in the midst of the 

sea.” 



Maritime Plain.—I. TheSnEFELA: the Philistines : 1. Maritime character— 
name of Palestine ; 2. The strongholds—sieges ; 3. Corn-fields—con¬ 
tact with Dan; 4. Level plain—contact with Egypt and the Desert. II. 
Plain of Sharon —pasture-land—Dor—forest—Caesarea—connection 
with Apostolic history. III. Plain and Bay of Acre— Tribe of Asher. 
IY. Plain of Phcenicia : 1. Separation from Palestine ; 2. Harbours ; 
3. Security ; 4. Rivers. Tyre and Sidon—name of Syria. 


THE MARITIME PLAIN. 


We have now reached what was in fact the northern 
frontier of the chief home of the chosen people. All the 
main historical events of their earlier history passed in 
the mountains of Ephraim and of Judah. This clump of 
hills was the focus of the national life. All the parts of 
Palestine that lay round it to the west, to the north, and 
to the east were comparatively foreign ; the south, as we 
have seen, ended in the Desert. 

The point to which we have thus attained,— overlooking 
from the outposts of Manasseh the great battle-field of 
Esdraelon—compels us to make a retrograde movement 
and consider the Maritime Plain extending along the 
western coast, with which the plain of Esdraelon stands in 
close connection. 

I. Beginning from the southern Desert, the first division 
of this plain—which comprised the territory of the ancient 
Philistines—is uniformly termed in the Old Testament, The 
Low Country (“ Shefela ”)} The boundaries of this terri¬ 
tory, though indefinite, may be measured by their five 
great cities; of which Ekron is the furthest north, and 
Gaza the furthest south. Two parallel tracts divide the 
flat plain :—the sandy tract (Ramleh) on which stand the 
maritime cities; and the cultivated tract which presents 
the most part an unbroken mass of corn, out of which 
rise here and there slight eminences in the midst of gar¬ 
dens and orchards, the seats of the more inland cities. 
Gath has entirely disappeared, but Ekron, Ashdod, Gaza, 
and Ascalon retain their names ; and the three last have 

1 “ Shefela,” the Hebrew word, is preserved untranslated in 1 Macc. xii. 38. 
See Appendix, sub voce. 


‘ The She¬ 
fela, ’ or 
Philistia. 




252 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


Maritime 
character 
of the Phi¬ 
listines. 


Name of 
Palestine. 


sites sufficiently commanding to justify their ancient fame. 
The four points thus indicated in the Philistine territory— 
its seaboard, its strongholds, its fertility, its level plain— 
contain the solution of much of their history. 

1. Without losing ourselves in doubtful discussions as 
to their origin, it is obvious that they were a maritime 
nation ; differing it would seem from the other great 
maritime power of Phoenicia in the north, in the fact, 
that whereas the Phoenicians were, so far back as history 
extends, indigenous—the Philistines were emphatically 
“ strangers ” (such is the meaning of the word, and so the 
LXX translate it). 1 They were “strangers” from beyond 
the western sea, whether from Asia Minor, as seems to 
be implied in the name of Caphtor (according to the 
LXX Cappadocia) or from the nearer island of Crete, 
as seems to be implied in their appellation of Cherethites. 2 
To such colonists the southern shores of Palestine offered 
a home. On those shores they still retained, if not their 
seafaring habits, of which there are no further traces, at 
least their seafaring worship. Dagon, the “Fish-god,” 
was honoured with stately temples even in the inland 
cities of Gaza and Ashdod: 3 Derceto, the Fish-goddess 
was worshipped at Ascalon 4 —their one maritime town. 
Perhaps we ought to reckon to them in earlier times the 
port of Jaffa—traditionally the most ancient in the world, 
and near which the modern village of Beit-Dejan preserves 
the name of another “ House of Dagon,” of which the 
ancient records make no mention : and it must have been 
in the port of Jaffa that Dan—to whose lot this portion 
fell—“ abode in his ships,” 5 during the conflict of the 
central and northern tribes with Sisera. To this same 
maritime situation must be ascribed the curious fact 
that from this foreign and hostile race the Holy Land 
acquired the name by which it is most commonly known 
in the Western world. “Palestine,” or “the land of 
the Philistines,” was the part of Judaea with which the 
Greeks were first and chiefly acquainted, as they fol¬ 
lowed in the track of the Egyptian Pharaohs and 

1 aWocpvXoi. 2 Zeph. ii. 5. 3 1 Sam. v. 2 ; Judg. xvi. 23 ; 1 Macc. x. 84. 

4 Judg. v. 17. 5 Diod. Sic. ii. 4. 


THE MARITIME PLAIN. 


253 


Ptolemies along this narrow strip of Syria, or as their 
vessels may occasionally have touched at Jaffa. And thus 
by a process similar, though converse, to that by which the 
Romans gave the name of Asia and Africa to the two 
small provinces which they first possessed on those two 
continents, or the English applied the name of the whole 
Teutonic race (Dutch) to that people of Germany which lay 
immediately opposite their own shores, the title of “ Phi- 
list ia,” or “ Palestine,” was transferred from the well-known 
frontier to the unknown interior of the whole country. 

2. The cities have been already enumerated. There is The strong¬ 
nothing specially to distinguish them each from each. holds * 
They rise above the plain on their respective hills—Gaza, 

Ashdod, and Ekron withdrawn from the coast, Ascalon 
and Jaffa situated upon it. They are all remarkable for the 
extreme beauty and profusion of the gardens which sur¬ 
round them—the- scarlet blossoms of the pomegranates, 
the enormous oranges which gild the green foliage of 
their famous groves. Well might Jaffa, 1 “ the beautiful/' be 
so called; well might Ascalon be deemed the haunt of the 
Syrian Yenus. Her temple is destroyed, but the Sacred 
Doves, 2 —sacred by immemorial legends on the spot, and 
celebrated there even as late as Eusebius,—still fill with 
their cooings the luxuriant gardens which grow in the sandy 
hollow within the ruined walls. These cities, thus situated 
on the grand route of the invaders of Palestine from north Their 
or south, have always played a part in resisting the attacks Sieges * 
of besieging armies. The longest siege recorded in history 
was that conducted for twenty-seven years by Psamme- 
tichus against Ashdod. In Ascalon was entrenched the 
hero of the last gleam of history which has thrown its 
light over the plains of Philistia. Within the walls and 
towers still standing, Richard held his court—and the 
white-faced hill which from their heights, forms so con¬ 
spicuous an object in the western part of the plain, is 
the “ Blanche-garde 99 of the Crusading chroniclers, which 
witnessed his chief adventures. 3 

1 See Chapter V. p. 240. “ White city,” which Sennacherib was 

2 See the legendary origin of the besieging immediately before the de- 

Sacred Doves, in Diod. Sic. ii. 4. struction of his army ? The name, the 

3 May it not also be “ Libnah,” the situation, and the strength of the posi- 


254 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


Cornfields. 


Contact 
with Dan. 


3. But the most striking and characteristic feature of 
Philistia is its immense plain of cornfields, stretching from 
the edge of the sandy tract right up to the very wall of 
the hills of Judah, which look down its whole length from 
north to south. These rich fields must have been the 
great source at once of the power and the value of Phi¬ 
listia ; the cause of its frequent aggressions on Israel, and 
of the unceasing efforts of Israel to master the territory. 
It was in fact a “ little Egypt.” As in earlier ages the 
tribes of Palestine, when pressed by famine went down to 
the Valley of the Nile, so, in later ages, when there was a 
famine in the hills of Samaria and the plain of Esdraelon, 
the Shunammite went with her household “ and sojourned 
in the land of the Philistines seven years.” 1 In that 
plain of corn, and those walls of rock, lies the junction of 
Philistine and Israelite history, which is the peculiarity 
of the tribe of Dan. 2 These are the fields of “ standing 
corn,” with “ vineyards and olives ” amongst them, into 
which the “ three hundred ‘jackals’” 3 w r ere sent down 
from the neighbouring hills. In the dark openings here 
and there seen from far in the face of those blue hills, 
w^ere the fortresses of Dan, whence Samson “went down” 4 
into the plain. Through these same openings, after the 
fall of Goliath, the Philistines poured back and fled to 
the gates of Ekron, and through these the milch-kine, 
lowing as they went, carried back the Ark to the hills 
of Judah. 5 In the caves 6 which pierce the sides of 
the limestone-cliffs of Lekieh and Deir-Dubban on 


tion perfectly agree. (Compare Joshua, 
xv. 42.) 

1 2 Kings viii. 2. 

2 With the exception of the events 
of Samson’s life, the history of the 
southern portion of Dan is too closely 
interwoven with that of Judah to be 
further developed. In one instance 
the Talmud speaks of the houses of a 
particular city (Baalath), belonging 
to Judah, and the fields to Dan. 
(Schwarze, p. 138). So at Hebron 
the city belonged to Levi, and the fields 
to Judah; Josh. xxi. 11, 12. 

3 “Shualim,” Judg. xv. 4. 

4 Jud. xiv. 1, 5, 7. 

5 1 Sam. vi. 12 ; xvii. 52. 


6 That both these caverns were in 
this direction is implied by the con¬ 
text. Samson, after the slaughter at 
Timnath, “ went down into the ‘ cleft ’ of 
the ‘cliff’ Etam,” and there concealed 
himself till he was ‘ ‘ brought up ” by 
the Philistines. (Judges xv. 8, 13.) 
David fled from Gath to the cave of 
Adullam, and all his father’s house went 
down from the hills of Bethlehem to 
visit him there. (1 Sam. xxii. 1.) 
Adullam is also fixed by Joshua, xv. 
35, to be in the Shefela, that being the 
word rendered ‘valley’ in verse 33. 
For the probable identification of those 
caves, see Van de Velde, ii. 140, 157. 


THE MARITIME PLAIN. 


255 


the edge of the plain, may probably be found the refuge 
of Samson in the 4 cliff ; Etam, before his victory with the 
jawbone ; as afterwards of David in the cave of Adullam. 
It is not often that on the same scene, events so romantic 
have been enacted at such an interval of time, as 
the deeds of strength which were wrought in this plain 
by him, “ before whose lion ramp the bold Askalonite 
fell,” and those of our own Coeur de Lion. 

4. As these plains form the point of junction and con¬ 
trast with the hills of Judah on the west, so they form a 
point of junction and similarity with the wide pastures of 
the Desert on the south. This free access from the wil¬ 
derness to the unprotected frontier of Philistia is what in 
more recent times has always attached its fortunes more 
or less to those southern regions. Hence the frequent 
march of the Egyptian kings through the 4 low country/ 
Hence the possession of this plain by the Edomite Arabs, 
who, taking Eleutheropolis for their capital, occupied it 
under the name of Idumea, during the period of the Herods. 
Hence the insecurity of these parts at the present day 
from the unchecked incursions of the Bedouin tribes 
pouring in from beyond Gaza, reproducing a likeness of 
the desolations, which, probably from the same cause, 
befell this same region at the close of the Jewish 
monarchy. 44 0 Canaan, the land of the Philistines, I will 
even destroy thee that there shall be no inhabitant, 
and the sea coast shall be dwellings and 4 cisterns 5 for 
shepherds, and folds for flocks.” 1 

II. The corn-fields of Philistia, as we advance further 
north, melt into a plain, less level and less fertile, 
though still strongly marked off from the mountain- 
wall of Ephraim, as that of Philistia was from the hills 
of Judah and Dan. This is 44 Sharon,” a name of the same 
root as that used to designate the table-lands beyond 
the Jordan (“Mishor”), and derived from its smooth¬ 
ness— that is, apparently, its freedom from rock and 
stone. 2 Like the Philistine plain it is divided into the 
“Ramleh,” or sandy tract along the seashore, and the 
cultivated tract further inland, here called 44 Khassab,” 

1 Zeph. ii. 5, 6. 2 Like the Greek word a(pe\rjs. (See Appendix.) 


Level 

Plains. 


Contact 
with Egypt 
and the 
Desert. 


Idumea. 


Plain op 
Sharon. 


256 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


Pasture- 

land. 


Dor, and 
Naphatli- 
Dor. 


“ the reedy; ” apparently from the high reeds which 
grow along the banks of some of the streams which 
here fall into the Mediterranean ; one of them always 
having borne that name—“ Kanah,” 1 or the “ reedy.” 
It is interspersed with corn-fields and thinly studded with 
trees, the remnants, apparently, of a great forest which 
existed here down to the second century. 2 Eastward the 
hills of Ephraim look down upon it—the huge rounded 
ranges of Ebal and Gerizim 3 towering above the rest; 
and, at their feet the wooded cone, on the summit of 
which stood Samaria. But its chief fame then, as now, 
was for its excellence as a pasture-land. Its wide undu¬ 
lations are sprinkled with Bedouin tents, and vast flocks of 
sheep; the true successors of “ the herds which were 
fed in Sharon,” in David's reign, under “ Shitrai, the 
Sharonite,” 4 and of “ the folds of flocks,” which Isaiah 
foretold in “ Sharon,” as the mark of the restored 
Israel. 5 Probably this very fact, then as now, rendered 
it insecure, and therefore unfrequented by the Israelites of 
the mountain country above ; at any rate during the 
whole period of the Old Dispensation no one historical 
name or event is attached to this district. The only 
town that marked the region in early times is Dor, with its 
surrounding district of “ Naphath-Dor ; ” 6 and this was 
in the hands of the Canaanites, their furthest southern 
settlement, the southernmost of that line of seaport towns 
which extends henceforth in regular succession along the 
coast as far as Aradus, or Arvad. Its situation, with its 
little harbour enclosed within the wild rocks rising over 
the shell-strewn beach, and covered by the fragments of 
the later city of Tentura, is still a striking feature on 
the desolate shore. 

But it was the fate of Sharon, as of some other parts of 


1 Joshua xvi. 8 ; xvii. 9. In the 
Gemara (Shevith fol. 38, 4), reeds are 
mentioned as the special mark of 
streams. (Reland’s Palestine, p. 306.) 

2 Efra Spv/ios p.eyas ns, Strabo, xvii. 

Apv/jLos is the same word by which 

the lxx have translated “ Sharon,” in 

Isa. lxv. 10, certainly not from its real 

meaning, and therefore probably from 


this well-known feature by which to 
them it was chiefly distinguished. 

3 See Chapter V. p. 248. 

4 1 Chr. xxvii. 29. 

5 Isaiah lxv. 10. 

6 Josh. xi. 2 (“borders”); xii. 23 
(“coast”); 1 Kings iv. 11 (“region”). 
For the word Naphath, see Appendix. 


THE MARITIME PLAIN". 

Palestine, after centuries of obscurity to receive a new life 
under the Roman Empire. From being the least distin¬ 
guished tract it rose in the reign of Herod almost to the first 
importance. On a rocky ledge, somewhat resembling 
that of Ascalon on the south, and Dor on the north, 
rise the ruins of Caesarea, now the most desolate site in 
Palestine. Like the vast fragments of St. Andrew's in 
Scotland, they run out into the waves of the Mediter¬ 
ranean sea, which dashes over the prostrate columns and 
huge masses of masonry ; but, unlike St. Andrew's— 
unlike in this respect to most Eastern ruins—no sign of 
human habitation is to be found within the circuit of its 
deserted walls, no village or even hovel remains on the site 
of what was once the capital of Palestine. With his 
usual magnificence of conception, Herod the Great 
determined to relieve the inhospitable barrier which the 
coast of his country opposed to the Western world, by 
making an artificial port, and attaching to it the chief city 
of his kingdom. The divergence of Eastern and Western 
ideas is well illustrated by the contrast between this Roman 
metropolis and those native capitals of Hebron, Jerusalem, 
Shechem, and Samaria, which we have already examined. 
Whatever differences distinguished those older cities from 
each other, they had this in common, that they were 
all completely inland. To have planted the centres of 
national and religious life on the sea-shore was a thought 
which never seems to have entered even into the imperial 
mind of Solomon. Far away at Ezion-Geber on the 
Gulf of Akaba, was the chief emporium of his trade. 
Even Jaffa only received the rafts which floated down 
the coast from Tyre. 1 To describe the capital as a place 
“ where shall go no galley with oars, neither shall gallant 
ship pass by," 2 is not, as according to Western notions 
it would be, an expression of weakness and danger, but 
of prosperity and security. But in Herod this ancient 
Oriental dread of the sea had no existence. He had 
himself been across the Mediterranean to Rome, and on 
his alliance with Rome his own power depended ; and 
when, after his death, his kingdom became a Roman 


257 


Caesarea. 


1 1 Kings ix. 27; v. 9. 


2 Isaiah xxxiii. 21. 


258 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


onnection 
of Sharon 
and Caesa¬ 
rea with 
Apostolic 
history. 


province, the city which he had called by the name of 
his Imperial patron, was still continued as the seat of 
the Roman governor, for the same reason as that which 
induced him to select the site—its maritime situation. 
From that sea-girt city, Pontius Pilate came yearly across 
the plain of Sharon, and up the hills, to keep guard on 
the Festivals at Jerusalem. In the theatre, built by his 
father,—looking out, doubtless, after the manner of all 
Greek theatres, over the wide expanse of sea,—Herod 
Agrippa was struck with his mortal disease. 1 

The chief, indeed the only important link which 
Caesarea possesses with Sacred history, is that which is 
at once explained by the fact of its being the seat of 
government. Of all the regions of Palestine there is none 
which is so closely connected with the Apostolic history as 
this tract of coast between Gaza and Acre, and especially 
the neighbourhood of Caesarea. After the first few years 
or months of the Church of the Apostles, the scene of their 
labours was removed from the ancient sanctuaries of their 
race “in Judaea and Samaria" to “the uttermost parts of 
the land/’ Partly, no doubt, the half Gentile cities of the 
coast were more secure than the centres of national 
fanaticism in the interior; partly, in the growing con¬ 
sciousness of the greatness of their mission, these vast 
Gentile populations had for them an increasing attraction, 
powerful enough to break through the old associations 
which had at first bound them to the scenes of their 
country's past history and of their Lord's ministrations. 

Philip, after his interview with the Ethiopian pilgrim 
on the road to Gaza, “ was found at Ashdod, and passing 
through preached in all the cities till he came to Csesarea," 2 
and there with his four daughters he made his home. 3 
Peter “came down " from the mountains of Samaria “to 
the saints which dwelt at Lydda; and all they that dwelt 
at Lydda and Saron saw him and turned to the Lord :" 
and “forasmuch as Lydda was nigh to Joppa," 4 he “arose 
and went" thence to comfort the disciples mourning for 


1 Acts xii. 21; Josephus, Ant. XIX. 
viii. 2. 

2 Acts viii. 26, 40. 


3 Acts xxi. 8. 

4 Acts ix. 32, 35, 38. 


THE MARITIME PLAIN. 


259 


the loss of Dorcas; and there “he tarried many days ” with 
the tanner, Simon, whose “ house was by the sea-side.” 1 
On the flat roof of that house—overlooking the waves of 
the western sea, as they dash against the emerging rocks 
of the shallow and narrow harbour,—the vision ap¬ 
peared which opened to the nations far beyond the 
horizon of that sea “the gates of the kingdom of 
Heaven,” and which called the Apostle to make the 
memorable journey along the sandy ridge of the coast, to 
find on the morrow the first Gentile convert in the Roman 
garrison at Caesarea. And lastly, it was across the plain 
of Sharon to Antipatris that Paul was brought under 
cover of the night; 2 and in the castle of Caesarea were 
spent the two last years of the Apostle in the Holy Land, 
before he finally left the East for Rome and Spain. 

These movements of the Apostles, no doubt, are con¬ 
nected only by the slightest thread with the ground over 
which they pass. The sight of the places throws but a 
very faint light on the history of the primitive advance 
of Christianity. Yet it is not without importance to see 
the reason why they so turned around this hitherto 
unknown spot, and thus to trace back to its origin the 
first contact of the religion of the East with the power of 
the West. It is, as if Christianity already felt its European 
destiny strong within it, and, by a sort of prophetic anti¬ 
cipation, gathered its early energies round those regions 
of the Holy Land which were most European and least 
Asiatic. 

III. The plain of Sharon contracts beyond Dor, and 
there now appears rising at its extremity the long ridge 
of Carmel closing up its northern horizon. Round the 
promontory of Carmel, runs a broad beach, which, un¬ 
interrupted by the advance of tides, must always have 
afforded an easy outlet for the Philistine armies, for the 
kings of Egypt, for the forces of the Crusaders, to the bay 
of Accho, or Acre. This bay with its adjacent plain, 
opening between Carmel and the hills of Galilee, and 
forming the embouchure, so to speak, of the great plain of 

2 Acts, xxiii. 31, 33. 

s 2 


Plain and 
Bat op 
Acre. 


1 Acts, ix. 43; x. 6. See Note A. 


260 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


Tribe of 
Asher. 


Esdraelon, may be regarded in some respects as a con¬ 
tinuation of the maritime tract which we have been hitherto 
following. There is still the same tract of white sand-hills, 
through which the two short streams of the Kishon and 
the Belus fall into the sea ; and beyond, a rich soil, perhaps 
the best cultivated and producing the most luxuriant crops, 
both of corn and weeds, of any in Palestine. On the 
south of the plain rises the long ridge of Carmel, its 
western end crowned by the French convent; on the 
north, the bluff promontory of the Ladder of the Tyrians, 
the modern Ras Nakhora, differs from Carmel in that 
it leaves no beach between itself and the sea, and thus by 
cutting off all communication round its base, acts as the 
natural barrier between the Bay of Acre and the maritime 
plain to the north—in other words, between Palestine and 
Phoenicia. Acre, therefore, is the northernmost city of the 
Holy Land, on the western coast; and gathers round it 
whatever interest attaches to this corner of the country. 
As in the case of Caesarea, and for a similar reason, that 
interest is of a recent date, and thus, reversing the 
fate of all the other cities of Palestine, has grown and 
not decayed with the lapse of years. It is indeed of 
far older origin than Caesarea, being one of the 
Canaanitish settlements, from which the Israelites had 
been unable to expel the old inhabitants ; 1 and it is a 
remarkable instance of the tenacity with which a Semitic 
name has outlived the foreign appellation impressed upon 
it. Ptolemais,—the title which it bore for the many cen¬ 
turies of Greek and Roman sway—dropped off the moment 
that sway was broken, and in the modern name of Acre, 
the ancient Accho, 2 derived from the “ heated sandy ” 
tract on which the town was built, re-asserted its rights. 
But with the single exception of St. Paul’s landing there 
when he commenced his last land journey to Jerusalem, 3 
it has no connection with the course of the Sacred History. 
Asher, was the tribe to whose lot the rich plain of 
Acre fell—he “ dipped his foot in oil; ” his “ bread was 
fat, and he yielded royal dainties.” 4 But he dwelt among 

1 Judges i. 81. 3 Acts xxi. 7. 

2 See Gesenius in voce, p. 1020. 4 Deut. xxxiii. 24; Gen. xlix. 20. 


THE MARITIME PLAIN. 


261 


the Canaanites; he could not drive out the inhabitants 
of Accho, or of Achzib ; he gave no judge or warrior 
to Israel. One name only of the tribe of Asher shines 
out of the general obscurity—the aged widow, 1 who in 
the very close of the Jewish history “departed not from 
the Temple at Jerusalem, but served God with prayers 
and fastings night and day.” With this one exception, the 
contemptuous allusion in the Song of Deborah sums up 
the whole history of Asher—when in the great gathering 
of the tribes against Sisera, “ Asher continued on the 
sea-shore and abode in his ‘ creeks/ ” So insignificant 
was the tribe to which was assigned the fortress which 
Napoleon called the key of Palestine ; so slight is the 
only allusion, the only word that the Old Testament con¬ 
tains for that deep indentation of the coast, which to our 
eyes forms so remarkable a feature in the map of Palestine, 
a feature in the nomenclature of which the languages of 
the West are so prolific. Thither, however, as to a natural 
and familiar haven, the European navigators of a later 
time eagerly came. Bad as the harbour was, yet the 
mere fact of a recess in that long coast, invited them ; 
and Caipha, at the opposite corner of the bay under 
the shelter of Mount Carmel, served as a roadstead. And 
when, as in later times, foreign rice became the staple 
food of the country, the importance of Acre, the only 
avenue by which it could regularly enter, was carried 
to the highest pitch. “The lord of Acre, may, if it 
so please him, cause a famine to be felt even over all 
Syria. The possession of Acre extended the influence 
of the famous Djezzar Pacha even to Jerusalem.” 2 The 
peculiarity therefore of the story of Acre lies in its 
many sieges—by Baldwin, by Saladin, by Richard, by 
Khalil, by Napoleon, by Ibrahim Pacha, and by Sir 
Charles Napier. From all these circumstances it has, in 
modern times, acquired a peculiar distinction amongst the 
cities of Palestine ; bearing the same relation to the 
Western world of modern history that Caesarea did to 
the Western world of ancient history. But the singular 

1 “ Anna, the daughter of Phanuel, 2 Clarke’s Travels, iv. 89. 
of the tribe of Aser.” Luke ii. 36. 


Acre. 


262 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


Plain op 
Ph(enicia. 


fate which it enjoyed at the close of the Crusades gives 
it an interest which ought never to be forgotten by those 
who in the short space of an hour’s walk can pass round 
its broken walls. Within that narrow circuit—between 
the Saracen armies on one side, and the roar of the 
Mediterranean Sea on the other—were cooped up the 
remnant of the Crusading armies, after they had been 
driven from every other part of Palestine. Within that 
circuit “ the kings of Jerusalem and Cyprus, of the house 
of Lusignan ; the princes of Antioch ; the counts of Tripoli 
and Sidon; the great masters of the Hospital, the Temple, 
and the Teutonic Orders; the Republics of Venice, Genoa, 
and Pisa; the Pope’s legate; the kings of France and 
England, assumed an independent command. Seventeen 
tribunals exercised the power of life and death.” 1 All the 
eyes of Europe were then fixed on that spot, even more 
than of late on the besieged and besiegers of Sebastopol. 
Acre contained in itself a complete miniature of feudal 
Europe and Latin Christendom. 

IV. With the northern extremity of the plain of Acre, 
the coast of the Holy Land is naturally terminated by 
the promontories of the Tyrian Ladder (Ras-en-Nakhora) 
and the White Cape (Ras-el-Abiad) ; the first deriving its 
name from the fact that it was the entrance into the 
Phoenician territory, the latter from its white rocks. 2 

But though thus separated both historically and geo¬ 
graphically from Palestine, the plain of Phoenicia in all 
essential features furnishes so natural a continuation of 
the maritime plain of Judaea and Samaria, that it will be 
best considered here. The double tract—of sand along the 
shore, of cultivated land under the hills,—still continues. 
The towns, too, resemble in their situation all those which 
we have hitherto noticed along the coast: standing out 
on rocky promontories, with very small harbours, natural 
or artificial. If there were any difference to be observed 
which might in any degree account for the far greater 
celebrity obtained by these cities in commerce and 

1 Gibbon, vii. 442. de Velde, i. 247,) to fix that name 

2 Probably both those promontories exclusively on the White Cape, simply 
are comprised under the name of “Scala from its greater nearness to Tyre. 
Tyriorum.” It is needless (with Van 


THE MARITIME PLAIN. 


263 


navigation, it would be that the promontories of Tyre, 
Sidon, and Bey rout project further, and thus form some¬ 
thing more of a protection, or of a sea-girt situation, than 
those of Ascalon, Jaffa, Dor, or Acre. Perhaps, also, the 
.groves and gardens which surround the ports from which 
these promontories start, are, especially at Beyrout and 
Sidon, more extensive and luxuriant even than those at 
Jaffa. This long line of coast, then, from the White Cape 
far up to Arvad—a length equal to that of the whole of 
Palestine from Dan to Beersheba—is the famous country, 
second only to Palestine itself in its effect on the ancient 
world, called by the Hebrews, partly perhaps in allusion 
to its level plain, “ Canaan ” or “ the Lowland,” the 
more remarkable for its situation under the highlands of 
Lebanon ; called by the Greeks Phoenicia, or the “ Land 
of Palms,” from the palm-groves which appear indeed 
at intervals all along the western coast, but here more 
than elsewhere. 1 

So completely was the line of demarcation observed, 
which the Tyrian promontories interposed between 
Phoenicia and Palestine, that their histories hardly 
touch. Their relations were always peaceful, so that 
the incessant wars, which brought the Syrians from 
the north, and the Philistines from the south, into the 
heart of Judsea, never produced any contact with the great 
commercial states of this secluded tract. The trading 
alliance of Solomon with Hiram, the marriage of Ahab 
with the daughter of Ethbaal, 2 and the temporary exile of 
Elijah at Sarepta, 3 —the momentary glimpses, first of 
Christ, 4 and then of Paul within the Tyrian territory, 
are the only occasions which bring any portion of the 
Sacred history into the region which was the primeval 
cradle of commerce and of letters. 

But the very fact of this contrast, may justify a few 
words on the connection between the plain of Phoenicia 
and the fortunes of its inhabitants. First, its sea- 

1 This is more likely than the deriva- of Tyre, Sidon, and Arvad (See Ken- 
tion suggested by Mr. Kenrick in his rick’s Phoenicia, p. 35). 
able work on Phoenicia, (p. 68), from 2 1 Kings xvi. 31. 

the " bay ” colour of the inhabitants; 3 1 Kings xvii. 9. 

especially as the palm was the emblem 4 Matt. xv. 21. See Note C. 


Slightness 
of its con¬ 
nection 
with Pa¬ 
lestine. 


264 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


Harbours. 


Security. 


Rivers. 


Tyre and 
Sidon. 


board, with such little harbours as its headlands furnish, 
naturally made it the earliest outlet of Asiatic enterprise. 
From this coast the inhabitants of that old continent must 
have made their first discoveries ; and for the first begin¬ 
nings of such voyages, as in the analogous case of 
Greece, the smallness of the ports was not a sufficient 
objection. No one who has seen Munychia and Phalerum 
need be surprised at the narrow space of the havens of 
Tyre and Sidon. Secondly, there was the protection of 
the vast range of Lebanon. This at once gave to the 
southern coast of Phoenicia a security which the southern 
coast of Philistia has never enjoyed. The Bedouin 
tribes, no doubt, occasionally cross the Tyrian Ladder 
or the Galilean hills into Phoenicia, but their incursions 
must be very rare compared with those to which Philistia 
has been subject, in early times from the mountaineers of 
Judaea, in later times from the Arabs of the Sinaitic Desert. 
Thirdly, the ranges of Lebanon send across the narrow 
strip of Phoenicia streams of a size and depth wholly 
unknown to Palestine. The Leontes, as we have seen, 
one of the four rivers of the Lebanon, though not equal 
in its effect on the country which it waters to the other 
three, is yet the largest river in Syria—the largest river 
which the traveller from Egypt will have seen since he 
left the Nile. And the more northern rivers, the “ pleasant 
Bostrenus ”—the modern Aulay—hard by Sidon ; the 
clear Lycus—River of the Wolf or Dog, so called from 
that fabled dog, whose bark at the approach of strangers 
could be heard as far as Cyprus; 1 the river of Adonis, 
which still “ runs purple to the sea, with blood of Tliammuz 
yearly wounded ; ” the sacred stream 2 of the romantic 
Kadisha—are amongst “ the streams from Lebanon,” 3 
which must always have kept Phoenicia fresh and fertile. 

If from the country generally we turn to its two cele¬ 
brated cities, their diminutive size is perhaps the most 
remarkable feature of their appearance. Each stands on 
a promontory, that of Sidon running out from a rich mass 

1 A likeness to it is found in a huge from its supposed identity with the 

fragment of ruin at the river’s mouth. “ Fountain of Gardens.” Cant. iv. 15. 
(Ritter, iv. 510.) 3 Cant. iv. 15. 

2 “ Kadisha,” the “ Holy Stream,” 


THE MARITIME PLAIN. 


265 


of gardens and palms; that of Tyre from a somewhat 
wider extent of plain, with Lebanon and Hermon both in 
view far in the distance. Of the two, Tyre is far the 
more interesting, not only because of its greater fame, but 
because there is more to tell what it was. The modern 
town has very much shrunk within its ancient limits, so 
that a large part of the island, that is, what was the 
island before Alexander joined it to the shore by the 
present long sandy isthmus, lies bare and uninhabited; 
fragments of columns lying heaped and tangled together 
in the waves; large fragments, too, of masonry of the 
walls of the old port; huge walls of an ancient castle, 
and also of the old cathedral. 1 In this last lie, far aw T ay 
from HohenstaufFen or Salzburg, the bones of the great 
Emperor Frederic JBarbarossa, brought thither after the 
long funeral procession which passed down the whole 
coast from Tarsus to Tyre, to lay his remains in this 
famous spot beside the dust of a yet greater man— 
Origen. 

The names of the two cities indicate their earliest rise. 
•“ Sidon” is the projecting point on which the first sea- 
fishermen stood to “catch” the “fish” 2 of the Mediter¬ 
ranean. The name of Tyre , 3 or, according to its ancient 
Hebrew and modern Arabic name, Tzur —which, in all 
probability, led the Greeks to transfer the appellation of 
this their first acquaintance to the whole land of Syria— 
points to its inseparable connection with the rugged shoal of 
“rock” [tzur) on which its island-sanctuary was first reared. 3 
In this respect Tyre was a fit type of the ancient Queen of 
Commerce. Situated not merely on a promontory, like all 
the other Phoenician cities, but on a sea-girt rock, she might 
well be regarded as a floating palace; as a ship moored 


1 The topography of ancient Tyre 
is somewhat confused. The following 
seems the most probable statement of 
it. 1. The original city or sanctuary 
(as in the parallel case of the Tyrian 
colony of Gades, and as is implied in 
Isaiah xxiii. 3, 6) was on the rocky 
island. 2. The city then spread far 
along the shore of the mainland. 3. 
This city was entirely destroyed by 


Alexander, and its ruins were known 
as Palse-Tyrus, or * ancient Tyre/ in 
distinction from the * new Tyre/ which 
he built partly on the island, partly on 
the mole by which he joined the island 
to the shore. (See Ritter; Lebanon, pp. 
324—336.) 

2 Kenrick’s Phoenicia, pp. 47, 58. 

3 Sec Appendix, s. v. Tzu/i\ 


Name 

Syria. 


266 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


Desolation 
of Phoe¬ 
nicia. 


by the long strand “in the midst of the seas,” with her 
“ masts of cedar,” her “ sails of fine linen, blue and 
purple/' her “ mariners, rowers, and pilots." 

There is one point of view in which this whole coast is 
specially remarkable. “ A mournful and solitary silence 
now prevails along the shore which once resounded with 
the world's debate." This sentence, with which Gibbon 
solemnly closes his chapter on the Crusades, well sums up 
the general impression still left by the six days' ride from 
Beyrout to Ascalon; and it is no matter of surprise that 
in this impression travellers have felt a response to the 
strains in which Isaiah and Ezekiel foretold the desolation 
of Tyre and Sidon. In one sense, and that the 
highest, this feeling is just. The Phoenician power which 
the Prophets denounced has entirely perished ; even 
whilst “ the world's debate" of the middle ages gave a 
new animation to these shores, the brilliant Tyre of 
Alexander and Barbarossa had no real connection with 
the Tyre of Hiram; and perhaps no greater stretch 
of imagination in ancient history is required than to 
conceive how the two small towns of Tyre and Sidon, 
as they now exist, could have been the parent cities of 
Carthage and Cadiz, the traders with Spain and Britain, 
the wonders of the East [for luxury and magnificence. 
So total a destruction, for all political purposes, of the two 
great commercial states of the ancient world has been 
frequently held up to commercial states in the modern 
world, as showing the precarious tenure by which purely 
mercantile greatness is held; and in this respect the 
prophecies of the Hebrew seers 2 were a real revelation of 
the coming fortunes of the world, the more remarkable 
because experience had not yet justified such a result. 
But to narrow the scope of these sublime visions to the 
actual buildings and sites of the cities is as unwarranted by 
facts as it is mistaken in idea. Sidon has probably never 
ceased to be a populous, and, on the whole, a flourishing 
town; small, indeed, as compared with its ancient 
grandeur, but never desolate, or without some portion of 

1 For the elaborate representation of Tyre as a ship, see Ezekiel xxvii. 3_ 26 j 

(Kenrick, pp. 193, 349). 2 i sa , xxiii| 15 . Ezek> xxv i._ xxv ii i . 


THE MARITIME PLAIN. 


267 


its old traffic; and still encompassed round and round 
with the lines of its red silk manufacture. Tyre may 
perhaps have been in a state of ruin shortly after the 
Chaldean, and, subsequently, after the Greek conquest 
of Syria. But it has been always speedily rebuilt; 
and the magnificent columns which strew its shores and 
its streets at the present day, attest its splendour 
during a long portion of its existence—through the period 
not only of its ancient, but of its mediaeval, history. 
After the termination of the Crusades, it still remained 
a seat of European factories ; and, though confined within 
a very small part of the ancient city, it is still a 
thriving and well inhabited village, with a considerable 
traffic of millstones, conveyed from Hermon in long 
caravans, and thence exported to Alexandria. The period 
during which it sunk to the lowest ebb, was during the last 
years of the past, and the first years of the present, cen¬ 
tury ; and the comparative desolation which it then exhi¬ 
bited no doubt presented some of the imagery on which 
so much stress has been laid, in order to convey the 
impression of its being a desolate rock, only used for 
the drying of fishermen's nets. But as this was not the 
case before that period, and is certainly not the case now, 
it is idle to seek for the fulfilment of the ancient predic¬ 
tion within those limits; and the ruin of the empire of 
Tyre, combined with the revival and continuance of the 
town of Tyre, is thus a striking instance of the moral and 
poetical, as distinct from the literal and prosaic, accom¬ 
plishment of the Prophetical scriptures. The same argu¬ 
ment applies with greater or less force to the prophecies 
against Ascalon, Damascus, and Petra, as well as to those 
of which the fulfilment is supposed to be yet future. If 
the revival of these cities, after their temporary destruc¬ 
tion, shows that we are not to press the letter of 
prophecy beyond its professed object, so also the destruc¬ 
tion of Jerusalem by the Romans shows that no expecta¬ 
tions of its future prosperity can be founded on prophecies 
uttered long before that time in reference to its restora¬ 
tion by Ezra. It is possible that, in the changes of the 
Turkish empire, Palestine may again become a civilised 


268 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


country, under Greek or Latin influences; that the 
Jewish race, so wonderfully preserved, may yet have 
another stage of national existence opened to them; 
that they may once more obtain possession of their 
native land, and invest it with an interest greater than it 
could have under any other circumstances. But the 
localities of Syria, no less than common sense and piety, 
warn us against confounding these speculations with divine 
revelations, or against staking the truth of Christianity and 
the authority of the Sacred Records on the chances of local 
and political revolutions. The curse 1 on Ascalon must 
have expired before the time when it became the residence 
of the Herods and the court of the Crusaders. If Petra 
under the Roman Empire rose into a great thoroughfare 
of Eastern traffic, and is now again, after a long interval 
of desertion, the yearly resort of European travellers, it is 
clear that the words 2 “ None shall pass through it for 
ever and ever/' cannot be extended beyond the fall of the 
race of Esau. In like manner the curtain of prophecy 
falls on the Holy City, when “ Jerusalem was trodden 
down ” 3 by the armies of Titus. Its successive revivals 
under Hadrian, Constantine, Omar, and Godfrey, as well 
as its present degradation, and its future vicissitudes, are 
alike beyond the scope of the Sacred Volume. 

1 Zepli. ii. 4, 7. 3 Luke xxi. 24. 

2 Isa. xxxiv. 10; Jer. xlix. 18. 


THE MARITIME PLAIN. 


260 


NOTE A. 

HOUSE OF SIMON AT JAFFA. 

One of the few localities which can claim to represent an 
historical scene of the New Testament is the site of the house of 
Simon, the tanner, at Jaffa. The house itself is a comparatively 
modern building, with no pretensions to interest or antiquity. The 
outer door is from the street in which stand the Latin and Armenian 
convents, but no church or convent appears to have been built 1 on 
the site and no other place is shown as such. The house is occu¬ 
pied by Mussulmans, and regarded by them as sacred; a small 
mosque or praying-place is in one of the rooms, which is said, 
by the occupants, to commemorate the fact that “the Lord Jesus 
here asked God for a meal, and the table came down at once,” 
a remarkable instance of the vulgar corruption of miracles so 
common in Mussulman traditions; and, in this case, curious as an 
evident confusion of the Mahometan version of the Heeding of 
the Hive Thousand with the vision of Peter. Such a tradition, 
even from the fact of its distortion, and from its want of Euro¬ 
pean sanction, has some claim to be heard. And this claim is 
remarkably confirmed by the circumstances of the situation. The 
house is close “ on the sea shore; ” the waves beat against the 
low wall of its court-yard. In the court-yard is a spring of fresh 
water, such as must always have been needed for the purposes of 
tanning, and which, though now no longer so used, is authentically 
reported 2 to have been so used in a tradition which describes the 
premises to have been long employed as a tannery. It is curious 
that two other celebrated localities may be still identified in the 
same manner. One is in Jerusalem. At the southern end of 
the Church of the Sepulchre stood the palace of the Knights of 
St. John. When Saladin took the Holy City, it is said that he 
determined to render the site of the palace for ever contemptible, 
by turning it into a tannery. And a tannery still remains with 
its offensive sights and smells amongst what are the undoubted 
remains of that ancient home of European chivalry. Another case 
is nearer home. Every one knows the story of the parentage of 
William the Conqueror, how his father, under the romantic cliff of 
Ealaise, saw Arlette amongst the tanneries. There again, the 
tanneries still take advantage of the running streams which creep 
round the foot of the rock, living memorials of the ancient story. 

The rude staircase to the roof of the modern house, flat now as 

1 See Weil’s Legends of the Koran, &c. p. 226. 

2 So we were informed by the hospitable and intelligent consul of Jaifa, Assaad Kayat. 


270 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


El-Haram 
and Arsuf. 


of old, leads us to the view which gives all that is needed for the 
accompaniments of the hour. There is the wide noonday heaven 
above; in front is the long bright sweep of the Mediterranean 
Sea, its nearer waves broken by the reefs famous in ancient Gentile 
legends as the rocks of Andromeda . 1 Fishermen are standing 
and wading amongst them—such as might have been there of 
old, recalling to the Apostle his long-forgotten nets by the Lake 
of Gennesareth, the first promise of his future call to be " a fisher 
of men.” 


NOTE B. 

VILLAGES OF SHABON AND PHOENICIA. 

It may be expedient to give here two or three notices of places, 
not as being directly connected with Sacred History, but as having 
been omitted in previous accounts. 

About an hour N. of Jaffa is a village on the sandy ridge of 
the " Bamleh,” " M-Haram Ali-ibn-Aleim” " the sanctuary of Ali 
the son of Aleim,” so called from the mosque and tomb of that 
saint, whose story as related to us by the keeper of the mosque is 
as follows : " He was a dervish in the adjacent village of Arsuf, 
Sultan of all the dervishes of all the country round. The villagers 
thought not at all about God. When Sultan Bibars (from Egypt) 
came to besiege it, Ali—who lived in the town on alms that were 
given to him—baffled him by catching all the cannon-balls in his 
hands. A dervish from the besieging army, after some time, came 
to ask him the cause of the failure of all their attacks. Ali replied, 
'Will the Sultan make me a good mosque and tomb, and is he 
a good Mussulman V 'Yes/ answered the dervish. 'Send him 
then to me, disguised as a dervish/ The Sultan Bibars came 
and promised to build for Ali the mosque and tomb; and Ali 
stipulated for twenty-four hours before the cannonading was to 
begin anew. He then warned the people of Arsuf to become 
Mussulmans, threatening the fall of the town if they refused to 
listen to him. They disbelieved him : the twenty-four hours elapsed 
—the cannonading recommenced—Ali no longer intercepted the 
balls, and the towrf was destroyed.” 

The ruins of Arsuf are still visible on an eminence a little north 
of "El-Haram,” with a fosse on the land-side, and w r alls on the 
sea-side. The mosque of the "Haram” professes to be the one 
built by Sultan Bibars in accordance with his promise, and the 
tomb which stands in the court of the mosque to have been built 
for the saint before his death, the body having been let down into 


1 Compare Kenrick’s Phoenicia, p. 20. 


THE MARITIME PLAIN. 


an 


the vault below through the two ends of the tomb, which are now 
walled up. 1 

Schwarze, confounding Eli and Ali, supposes the inhabitants 
to represent this as the grave of Eli . He says that on one side of 
the tombstone is a Hebrew, and the other a Samaritan, inscription; 
and that the Samaritans constantly go to perform their devotions 
at it (p. 143). 

Um-Khalid is one of the chief villages of the plain of Sharon, 
and the height above it commands one of the most striking views of 
the mountains of Ephraim, the very view in all likelihood in¬ 
tended in the description of Abraham's approach to Mount Gerizim 
when “ he saw the place afar off." 3 It is so called from a great 
female saint, “Sittah Saba, the mother of Khalid,” whose tomb 
is marked, not as usual by a mosque, but by a large enclosure in 
which it stands in the open air, under the shade of an enormous 
fig-tree. The ancient and Hebrew name of Antipatris, 3 which is 
situated about ten miles from Um-Khalid, was Caphar Saba, which 
is still preserved in the Arabic Kafar-Saba. The not unnatural 
belief of the peasants of Um-Khalid is, that this name is derived 
from the Lady Saba who lies buried under their own fig-tree. It 
would be a curious question to know whether this is an accidental 
coincidence, or whether there was a real Hebrew or Syrian worthy 
in earlier times, who has been thus connected with the later Arabian 
traditions of Khalid of Damascus. 

The identity of Surafend with Sarepta is unquestioned. It is a 
village seated aloft on the top and side of one of the hills, the long line 
of which skirts the plain of Phoenicia, conspicuous from far by the 
white domes of its many tombs of Mussulman saints. It throws no 
light on the story of Elijah, beyond the emphasis imparted to his 
visit by the complete separation of the situation from the Israelite 
territory on the other side the hills. But it may be worth while to 
record, as characteristic, the curious confusion of the story which 
lingers in the Mussulman traditions of the neighbourhood. Close 
on the sea-shore stands one of these sepulchral chapels dedicated to 


1 Pliny speaks of the town and river 
of Crocodiles in Phoenicia (H. N. v. 19), 
and Strabo (xvi.) places the town of Cro¬ 
codiles between Accho and Caesarea, ap¬ 
parently near the latter. The fact is 
noticed by Pococke. The river in ques¬ 
tion is a stream—fordable, but deep— 
immediately north of Caesarea, marked in 
Zimmermann’s map as Nahr Zerka. The 
keeper of the mosque of El-Haram curi¬ 
ously confirmed the old story. He said 
at once that the river was called ‘ ‘ Moi 
Temsah”—“the water of the crocodile” 
—and described, without any suggestion 
on our part, that he had seen in it crea¬ 


tures nearly as long as a boat, with long 
tails like lizards. I give this testimony 
for what it is worth. The man had never 
been in Egypt, nor ever seen an Egyptian 
crocodile. Compare Kenrick’s Phoenicia, 
p. 24. The name “ Moiet-el-Temseh” is 
preserved by M. De Saulcy, who supposes 
(ii. 347) that it rises at Nablous, and falls 
into the Mediterranean, under the name 
of Nahr-Arsuf. This last is clearly a 
mistake. 

2 See Chapter IY. ; note on Gerizim. 

3 For the whole question of Antipatris, 
see Howson and Conybeare’s St. Paul, 
vol. ii. pp. 277, 278. 


Um- 

Khalid. 


Sarepta. 


272 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


" El-Khudr,” or " Mar Elias.” 1 There is no tomb inside, only 
hangings before a recess. This variation from the usual type of 
Mussulman sepulchres was, as we were told by the peasants on the 
spot, " because El-Khudr is not yet dead; he flies round and round 
the world, and those chapels are built wherever he has appeared. 
Every Thursday night and Eriday morning there is a light so 
strong within the chapel, that no one can go in.” 

NOTE C. 

PHCENICIAN ANTIQUITIES ON THE MARITIME PLAIN. 

Tomb of The Phoenician plain, far beyond any part of Palestine Proper, 

Hiram. i s strewed with distinct fragments of older civilisation. One of 
these is the " Tomb of Hiram,” which has been shortly described 
by Robinson (iii. 384), and Yan de Yelde (i. 184); and engraved 
as a frontispiece to Captain Allen's w r ork on the Dead Sea. It 
stands inland amongst wild rocky hills, about three miles from 
Tyre. It is a single gray sarcophagus hollowed out so as just 
to admit a body. A large oblong stone is placed over it, so as com¬ 
pletely to cover it, the only entrance being an aperture knocked 
through at its eastern extremity. The whole rests on a rude pedestal 
of upright unhewn stones. There are other broken stones in the 
neighbourhood. Our guide from Tyre (professing to derive his in¬ 
formation from an Arabic work on Tyre, called " Torad,”) said " that 
it was the tomb of King Hiram, buried at the eastern gate of old Tyre, 
which thence reached down the hill towards the sea.” 

Nebi-Zur. Another monument of unknown age is a circle of upright stones — 
as of Stonehenge—which rises amongst the bushes near the shore, 
about an hour N. of the mouth of the Khasimeyeh, or Litany, 
near Adloun. 2 These must be what M. Yan de Yelde (i. 203) saw 
from a distance, and what his guide told him " were men turned 
into stone for scoffing at Nabi Zur.” They are not, however, 
statues, as he erroneously conjectures, but mere rough blocks of 
stone. Nabi Zur (of whom he here and elsewhere speaks) is 
evidently the "Prophet Zur” i. e. the Pounder (Eponymus) of 
Tyre—as Nabi Sidoon of Sidon. 

A third monument of great antiquity is the celebrated reservoir 
south of Tyre, called "the head of the spring”—"Ras-el-Ain.” 
This is the spot to which mediaeval tradition attached the visit of 
Christ to Tyre. He rested on a large rock, and sent Peter and 
John to bring him some water thence, which he drank, and blessed 
the beautiful spot whence it came. (See Maundeville, Early Tra¬ 
vellers, pp. 141, 142; Phocas, Acta Sanctorum, Maii. vol. ii.) 

1 For tbe legend of El Khudr, see Jelal-ed-din, 128; Scbwarze, 129, 446. 

2 See Kenrick’s Phcenicia, p. 19. 


CHAPTER VII. 


THE JORDAN AND THE DEAD SEA. 

Gen. xiii. 10. “And Lot lifted up his eyes, and beheld all the ‘round’ 
of Jordan.” 

Josephus’ Wars of the Jews, IV. viii. 2. “ The country between the 

two ranges of mountains which extend to the Lake of Asphalt is called ‘the 
great plain.’ Its length is 230 furlongs, and its breadth 120. It is divided 
in the midst by the river Jordan, and it contains two lakes, the Lake of 
Tiberias, and the Lake of Asphalt, of the most opposite natures; for the 
one is salt and barren, and the other sweet and full of life. In the sum¬ 
mer season the plain is burnt up, and from the excessive drought the air 
becomes pestilential; for the whole plain is without water except the 
Jordan; and so it results that the palm-groves on its banks are flourish¬ 
ing—but less so those that are further off.” 



The Four Rivers of Lebanon—The physical peculiarities of the Jordan—Its 
importance as the river of Palestine—Unfrequented—Historical scenes. 

1. Yale of Siddim and Dead Sea : 1. Battle of the Kings ; 2. Over¬ 
throw of Sodom and Gomorrah; 3. Appearance of the Dead Sea. 4. 
Vision of Ezekiel; 5. En-gedi. II. Plain—Terraces of the Jordan ; 1. 
Plain of Abel-Shittim—Encampment of the Israelites—Views from 
Pisgah—Balaam—Moses—Burial-place of Moses—Passage of the Jordan; 

2. Jericho—At the time of the capture—Of the prophets—Of Christ; 

3. Bethabara—Scene of the Preaching of John—Scene of the Temptation 
—Baptism in the Jordan—Bathing of the Pilgrims. 


THE JORDAN AND THE DEAD SEA. 


The history of the Jordan cannot be viewed without a 
consideration of the physical peculiarities which mark its 
relation to Palestine and to the world, and which must 
here be once for all noticed in detail. 

It is a characteristic of all the four rivers of the Lebanon, 
that they are almost precluded by the circumstances of 
their rise from attaining their natural outlet in the sea. 1 
To compare their position with that of rivers and 
mountains on a far larger scale, it is as if the Amazon and 
Orinoco after being confined within the lines of the Andes, 
were either lost in the Pampas without reaching the 
Atlantic, or by a violent turn in their course escaped 
into the Pacific. The Orontes and Leontes both flow 
parallel to the Mediterranean, for the greater part of 
their channels—shut out from it by the high wall of 
Lebanon. At the last moment, as it were, of their 
existence, they make a sudden turn westward, and 
descend into the sea. The Orontes 2 finds its outlet by 
doubling back upon itself, so that its course for the last 
thirty miles is parallel to the great body of its own stream. 
The * Leontes, though with a less rapid change, has to 
force its way through the narrow pass produced by the 
sudden offshoot which Anti-Libanus throws out westward, 

1 See Chapters II. and XII. This El Aazy “ the rebellious,” is said to be 
peculiarity of the rivers is well stated derived partly from its flowing contrary 
in Anderson’s Geological Description to all the other streams, and partly 
in the Official Report of Lynch’s from its wild and rapid current, which 
Expedition, pp. 80, 81. tears away all the bridges that men at- 

* The modern name of the Orontes, tempt to throw over it. (Schwarze, p. 57.) 

T 2 


The Four 
Rivers in 
their 
courses. 




276 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


The peculi¬ 
arities of 
the Jordan. 


as if with the very object of preventing its escape. A 
tremendous ravine of many miles marks what has been 
well called “ its difficult and romantic contest with the 
everlasting pillars of the Lebanon for a free passage to 
the Mediterranean Sea.” 1 The Barada alone issues into 
what would have been the natural exit for all—the plain 
of Syria, on the way to the Indian Ocean. But the basin¬ 
like character of that plain, combined with the effect of 
the burning waste beyond, stops short its career in wide 
marshy lakes, just beyond the city of Damascus. 

The Jordan combines in itself the peculiarities which 
belong to the other three. Rising in the fork of the two 
ranges of Anti-Libanus, it first runs by necessity within 
these two enclosing walls, parallel to the Mediterranean 
from north to south, as the Orontes from south to north. 
Its streams—for in this stage it can hardly be called a 
single river—are first received into the high lake of Merom, 
which might seem destined to absorb its waters, as in 
the case just mentioned of the river of Damascus. But 
two causes prolong its existence—first the continual supply 
which its own stream and that lake itself receives from 
the adjacent springs in the limestone cliffs of Lebanon— 
secondly, and in a more remarkable degree, the depression 
in the valley which begins here, and opens a course for the 
river to descend in its collected volume, and with increased 
rapidity downwards for three hundred feet into the Sea 
of Galilee. Again it might seem'to have met with its 
end, but again it plunges through twenty-seven rapids, 
through a fall of a thousand feet , 2 through what is the 
lowest and final stage of its course. Like the Leontes 
and Orontes, it would#now seem intent on making every' 
effort to escape—darting first to the right, then to the 
left, then to the right again, and thus descending so 

1 See an excellent description of the monster serpent chained in the yawning 
ravine of the Litany or Leontes in gulf . . . where she writhes and 

Dr. Thompson’s able essay on the struggles evermore to escape her dark 
sources of the Jordan, in the Bibliotheca and narrow prison, but always in vain, 
Sacra (iii. 205). He conjectures that save only near the sea-shore, where her 
this rent was produced by the same windings reach a close.” 
convulsion that occasioned the depres- 2 The only known instance of a 
sion of the Dead Sea. It is also des- greater fall is the Sacramento river in 
cribed by Van de Velde (i. 113). “A California. 


THE JORDAN AND THE DEAD SEA. 


277 


deviously and capriciously as to present the unparalleled 
spectacle of a course only sixty miles 1 in actual length, 
increased to two hundred by the infinite multiplication of 
its windings. But unlike the northern rivers of the 
Lebanon, the Jordan is doubly and trebly confined as well 
within its own successive terraces, as within the two high 
mountain-walls which accompany it on either side with 
undeviating regularity till they see it fall into its lowest 
depth in the Dead Sea. From this—its last receptacle 
—the Jordan emerges no more. 

It has thus three distinct stages—the first ending in the 
Lake of Merom, the second in the Sea of Galilee, and 
the third in the Dead Sea. The two earlier stages will 
be noticed as we ascend its course. The third stage, on 
which we now enter—the “great plain” of the later Jews; 
the “Aulon” or “channel” of the Greek geographers; 
the “ Ghor ” or “ sunken plain ” of the modern Arabs 2 — 
as it is the one in which the peculiar characteristics of the 
region are most signally exhibited, so it is the only one in 
which the river itself is connected with the Sacred history. 

The singular relations of the Jordan to the rest of 
the world were unknown to the Israelites. But its 
strange results as affecting their own country were familiar 
to them as to us ; and must have heightened in every 
age the charm which hangs over the mysterious valley. 
They must have been struck at all times by its great 
depression, to the depth of no less than three thousand 
feet below the mountains of Judaea—which is marked 
by the never-failing notice of the “ going up ” from, or 
the “ going down ” to its level, in the numerous allusions 
to the journeys up and down those high mountain-passes, 
from the first invasion of Joshua to the last journey of our 
Lord. They must have known habitually, what to us is 
known only through two adventurous expeditions—the 


1 Official Report of Lynch, pp. 30,149, 
205. “The Jordan is the crookedest 
river what is,” is the homely but forcible 
expression of the English Expedition 
(Journal As. Soc., xviii. 113), for the 
same characteristic which Pliny (H. N. 
v. 15) describes more rhetorically “am- 


nis, quatenus locorum situs patitur, 
ambitiosus.'’ 

2 For the name “ The great plain,” 
see Josephus, Bell. Jud. IV. viii. 2. For 
the “Aulon”and the “Ghor,” Ritter; 
Jordan, 481. 


278 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


swift descent of the stream as it leaves the Sea of Galilee, 
—from which in all probability is derived the one 1 
name by which it is called in the Old Testament, “ the 
Jordan” or “the Descender .” 2 They must have been 
struck, too, by the innumerable windings which in this 
descent it carves for itself in its deep bed—“ a gigantic 
green serpent” as seen from the adjacent heights 
threading its tortuous way through its tropical jungle. 
They knew well the beauty and richness of this mazy 
line of forest, “ the pride 3 of the Jordan,” the haunt 
of the lions, who, from the neighbouring Desert sheltered 
themselves in the reedy covert. They carefully marked 
in their geographical vocabulary the singular contrast 
so well described by Josephus , 4 between the naked Desert 
on the one hand, and on the other hand the rich vegetation 
along the winding banks of the river, and in the circles 
produced by its tributary streams. Throughout the several 
narratives of the Old Testament the distinction is always 
observed between the inhabited “ round ” or “ circles ” 5 of 

the river, marked off, with a vast mass 
of reeds growing in them. In these 
herds of lions are wont to dwell.” 

4 Josephus, Bell. Jud. IV. viii. 2. 

5 “ Ciccar ” and “ Geliloth.” These 
two curious terms (in the English version 
rendered ‘ plain ’ or ‘region,’) though 
occasionally with a wider application, 
usually denote the Jordan-valley— 
being applied respectively to its upper 
and its lower stage. It is tempting to 
derive this usage (with Reland, p. 274) 
from the windings of the stream ; and. 
it is not at any rate impossible that this 
may have suggested or confirmed the 
invariable use of “ ciccar,” the circular 
Oasis of Jei’icho and of the five cities. 
In later times no doubt the words were 
taken merely as provincial terms for 
“region,” and as such were translated 
both in the LXX, and in the New Testa¬ 
ment, T] nepixupos , “the surrounding 
neighbourhood.” It has been suggested 
to me that the Scottish word “ links ” 
is an analogous case. The “ Links of 
Forth,” probably derived from “linken,” 
to bind , would thus correspond to the 
original use of the words “ ciccar and 
geliloth,” whilst “ the Links of St. 
Andrew,” and “of Leith,” would be 
instances of the word applied to dis- 


1 It is never called the “ river ” or 
“ brook, * or any other name than its 
own, “ The Jordan.” See Appendix. 

2 A striking illustration is contained 
in Joshua, iii. 16, where the word for 
the “ coming down ” of the waters of 
the Jordan is precisely the same as 
that used in the singular for the river 
itself. Abulfeda and the old Arabic 
writers call it El Ordann. The Arabs 
near Tel-El-Khady call it Ed-Dan. But 
as a general rule its ancient name is re¬ 
presented by “Sheriah,” the “watering- 
place,” or “ Sheriat el-Khebir,” “ the 
great watering-place,” to distinguish 
it from “ Sheriat el-Mandhur,” the 
Hieromax. (Newbold, in Journal As. 
Soc., xvi. 12.) 

3 “ Gaon,” is rightly translated 
“pride” in Zech. xi. 3, and wrongly, 
“swelling,” in Jer. xii. 5 ; xlix. 19; 1. 
44 ; usually in connection with the 
lions. Reland (p. 274), quotes a good 
description of the Jordan from Phocas, 
the pilgrim of the 12th century, which 
shows that up to that time the jungle 
was still so regarded. “In the twisting 
and winding streams of the Jordan (iv 
reus tov lopSavov e\iKoeiSeoi nai ayyvAo- 
(Trpocpois poa7s), as is likely, there are 
certain portions of the lands, next to 


THE JORDAN AND THE DEAD SEA. 


279 


the Jordan, and the uninhabited “ Desert ’ n through which 
it flows. 

And lastly, it must have been impossible to overlook 
the singularity of the river, not merely in its ordinary 
aspect, but in the more eccentric phenomena which 
more or less powerfully affected its historical character. 
How far there are to be found any traces of strictly 
volcanic agency in the limestone bed of the Jordan-valley 
is still a question. But, such as there are, they are found 
nowhere else in Palestine, and if the agency which they 
seem to indicate was manifested in earlier times with 
greater force than at present, it would be the more 
impressive from its rarity. Of this nature are the warm 
springs, which, both on the Sea of Galilee and the Dead 
Sea, burst forth from the sides of the hills—the remains 
of lava which are said to exist on the shores of both lakes, 
—the earthquakes which have within the memory of man 
shaken down the cities of Safed and Tiberias—the masses 
of bitumen which are still found in the southern lake. 
That some such means were employed in the catastrophe 
of the Five Cities is now generally acknowledged. If 
any of the other extraordinary convulsions—such as the 
withdrawal of the waters of the Jordan, the earthquake 
which overthrew Jericho, and that which afterwards in 
the same neighbourhood struck a panic into the Philis¬ 
tine host, 2 —should have been effected by similar means, 
the student of the Old Testament will discover in the 
indications which still exist, a remarkable illustration and 
confirmation of the historical character of the Sacred 
records—the more so, because the secondary causes of 
such phenomena must to the historians themselves have 
been wholly unknown. 

Two general remarks occur before descending into 
detail on the several scenes of the history of the Jordan. 
On the one hand, it is the only river deserving of the name 


tricts, where the original meaning has 
no place, and is merged in the general 
sense of “ shore,” or “ bank.” See 
Appendix. 

1 The word for the Desert-plain of 
the Jordan ig almost always “Arabah,” 


or “ Ar-aboth,” being the continuation 
of the appellation now confined exclu¬ 
sively to the Desert-valley south of the 
Dead Sea. See Appendix. 

8 Josh. iii. 16 ; vi. 20. 1 Sam. xiv. 15. 


The great 
river of 
Palestine, 
but unfre¬ 
quented. 


280 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


which flows south of the Lebanon. Those which fall into 
it from the eastern hills,—the Hieromax, the Jabbok, and 
the Arnon, are too remote from historical Palestine to 
be of importance. The few streams which flow west¬ 
ward into the Mediterranean, such as the Belus, the 
Kislion, and those of the Plain of Sharon, are too insigni¬ 
ficant ever to have attracted attention, in comparison of 
the full volume of water poured by the Jordan in an 
unfailing supply through the whole length of the 
country. As such it was emphatically the River of 
Palestine ; and its name is thus used in the Book of Job 
as the synonym of a perennial stream. 1 But on the other 
hand, in contrast to the rivers of other countries, the 
Jordan from its leaving the Sea of Galilee to its end, 
adds hardly a single element of civilisation to the long 
tract through which it rushes. Whilst Damascus, whilst 
Antioch, whilst Egypt, derive their very existence from 
their respective rivers, the Jordan presents the singular 
spectacle of a river almost wholly useless — so far as 
civilised man is concerned—through the long ages of 
its history. It is, indeed, still the “ Sheriat el-Khebir,” the 
“ great watering-place 55 of the Bedouin tribes ; and so it 
must always have been. But it is the river of a Desert. 
“ The Desert, 5 ' as we have seen, is the ordinary name by 
which its valley was known — hardly a single city or 
village rose upon its actual banks. Within the narrow 
range of its own bed it produces a rank mass of vegetation, 
but this luxuriant line of verdure only sets off more com¬ 
pletely the contrast of life with death, which is its charac¬ 
teristic feature. 

This singular fate of the Jordan is the direct result of 
the depression of its channel. The depth of the valley 
in the bottom of which it flows, prevents its waters from 
escaping, like those of the Nile, to fertilise anything beyond 
its own immediate bed; but the tropical temperature 


1 In the description of the Behemoth, term for any river. This single expres- 

or hippopotamus, in Job xl. 23, it is sion is a strong indication that the 

said, “ He trusteth that he can draw up Book of Job, or at least this portion of 

Jordan into his mouth.” As the hippo- it, must have been composed by an in- 

potamus is not a native of Syria, it is habitant of Palestine. See Appendix, 

clear that the word is used as a general Jarden. 


THE JORDAN AND THE DEAD SEA. 


281 


to which its whole plain is thus exposed, whilst calling 
out into almost unnatural vigour whatever vegetation 
receives the life-giving touch of its waters, withers up 
every particle of verdure that is found beyond their reach. 
As a separation of Israel from the surrounding country, 
—as a boundary between the two main divisions of the 
tribes—as an image of water in a dry and thirsty soil— 
it played an important part; but not as the scene of great 
events, or the seat of great cities. 1 Its contact with the 
history of the people is exceptional, not ordinary,—con¬ 
fined to rare and remote occasions, the more remarkable 
from their very rarity. 

I. These instances we may now proceed to examine. The 
earliest is one which at first might seem to militate against 
what has just been said. There was once a time in the 
far distance of patriarchal ages, when the Jordan was 
not thus isolated. At the time of the first migration 
of the herdsmen of Chaldaea into the hills of Palestine, 
when Abraham and Lot looked down from the mountain 
of Bethel, on the deep descent beneath them, and Lot 
chose for himself the ‘circle’ of the Jordan, that ‘circle’ 
was different from anything that we now see. “ It was 
well watered everywhere as the garden of the Lord, and 
like the land of Egypt.” And this description is filled 
out in detail by subsequent allusions. It is described 
as a deep “valley,” distinguished from the surrounding 
“ desert ” by its fertile “ fields.” 2 If any credence is 
to be attached to the geological conclusions of the last 
fifty years, there must have been already a lake at its 
extremity, such as that which terminates the course of 
the Barada at Damascus, or of the Kowik at Aleppo.— 
Then, as now, it must have received in some form or 
other the fresh streams of the Jordan, of the Arnon, 
of En-gedi, of Callirrhoe; and, at the southern end, as 
Dr. Bobinson has observed, more living brooks than are 
to be found in all the rest of Palestine. On the banks 
of one or some of these streams there seems to have 
been an oasis or collection of oases, like that which is 

1 Plin. H. N. y. 15. “Accolis invi- 2 “Emek,” “Arabah,” “Siddim.” See 
turn se prsebet.” Appendix. 


Historical 
scenes con¬ 
nected with 
it. 


The Vale 
of Siddirn. 


282 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


Battle of 
the Kings. 


still from the same causes to be found on a smaller scale 
in the groves of En-gedi and of Jericho, 1 and in the Plain 
of Gennesareth, 2 or, on a larger scale, in the Paradise 
of Damascus. 3 Along the edge of this lake or valley, 
Gentile and Jewish records combine in placing the earliest 
seat of Phoenician civilisation. “ The Tyrians,” such is the 
account of Justin, 4 “ first dwelt by the Assyrian [or Syrian] 
lake before they removed to Sidon.” Sodom, Gomorrah, 
Admah, Zeboim, are—with Lasha (probably Laish) by the 
sources of the Jordan, and Sidon on the sea-shore,—men¬ 
tioned as the first settlements of the Canaanites. 5 When 
Lot descended from Bethel, “ the cities of the ‘ round ; ” of 
the Jordan formed a nucleus of civilised life before any 
city, except Hebron, had sprung up in Central Palestine. 

On those cities, as on the most promising spoil, the kings 
of the remote East descended ; as Damascus on the north 
of Palestine, so were these on the south. For twelve 
years they were subject to Chedorlaomer, king of Elajn, 
and in the thirteenth they rebelled. Then took place the 
first recorded invasion of Palestine by Assyria, 6 embracing 
in its sweep the whole range of mountains east of the 
Jordan down to Petra on the south, and the wilderness of 
Amalek on the east. The final struggle was in the Vale of 
Siddim. In that “ Vale of the Fields” was fought the first 
battle of Palestine ; two of the five kings were J slain in 
the conflict, and the routed army fled up the steep passes 
of the enclosing hills. The victors carried off their spoil 
and captives, and retreated up the long Valley of the 
Jordan on their homeward march. Far up the valley, 
at the very source of its river, just as they were on the 
point of crossing the range of Hermon, they were 
overtaken by the avenger. “ Abram the Hebrew,” 7 with 


1 See p. 300. 

2 See Chapter X. 

3 See Chapter XII. 

4 Justin, Histor. xviii. 3, 2 (See Ken- 
rick’s Phoenicia, 47). Josephus, Bell. 
Jud. IX., places all the cities in what 
he calls “the Sodomite district,” i.e. at 
the south end. 

5 Gen. x. 19. 

6 Gen. xiv. Tuch (in an article in 

the Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgen- 


landischen Gesellschaft, translated in 
Journal of Sacred Literature, i. 84,) 
argues with great probability that the 
object of these Oriental kings was to 
secure the commercial route to the 
Gulf of Akaba. Against his supposition 
that El Paran, their southernmost point, 
was Elath, is the fact that the word 
Midbar (“the wilderness ,”) is used in¬ 
stead of “ Arabah .” 

7 Gen. xiv. 13. 


THE JORDAN AND THE DEAD SEA. 


283 


his three hundred and eighteen armed slaves, and his 
ally Mamre of Hebron, was upon their' track ; at that 
point, then the Sidonian Laish, but afterwards the Israelite 
Dan, he attacked them by night, and chased them over 
the mountain-ridge far into the plain of Damascus. 

2. This is the earliest authentic record of Canaanite 
history, and exhibits the vale of the Jordan as it was 
never exhibited again. Even that record shows indi¬ 
cations,—like the earthquake at Pompeii which preceded 
the volcano of Vesuvius,—that a change was at hand. 
Pits of bitumen are there described as existing in the vale 
of Siddim. 1 The name of Sodom {burning), if it be not 
derived from the subsequent catastrophe, shows, like 
the “ Phlegrsean ” fields of Campania, that the marks of 
fire had already passed over the doomed valley. The 
name of “ Bela," the old name of “ Zoar,” was understood 
by Jewish tradition—perhaps fancifully, yet certainly in 
accordance with probability—to allude to the fact of its 
frequent subversion by earthquakes. 2 In what precise 
manner “ the Lord overthrew the cities" is not clearly 
indicated in the records either of Scripture or of natural 
remains. The great difference of level between the 
bottoms of the northern and the southern ends of the 
lake, the former being a depth of thirteen hundred, the 
latter only of thirteen feet, below the surface, confirms the 
theory that the southern end is of recent formation, and, if 
so, was submerged at the time of the fall of the cities, 
and that the vale of Siddim was the whole of the bay 
south of the promontory which now almost closes up 
its northern portion. 3 But, as Reland 4 long ago pointed 


1 Gen. xiv. 10. 

2 Jerome ad Isa. xv. (De Saulcy, i. 
479.) 

3 This is Dr. Robinson’s view, stated 

more precisely by Fallmerayer (Das 
Todte Meer, p. 88). I am anxious in 
stating this question to call attention 
to the great uncertainty in which it is 
still involved. If the very existence of 
volcanic agency in the historical period 
of Palestine (as already stated in p. 279) 
is still a matter of dispute, it is evident 
that the subject admits only of the 
most general statement. 


4 Reland, Palestina, p. 254. The only 
expression which seems to imply that 
the rise of the Dead Sea was within his¬ 
torical times, is that contained in Gen. 
xiv. 3 ,** the vale of Siddim, which is the 
Salt Sea.” But this phrase may merely 
mean that the region in question bore 
both names; as in the similar expres¬ 
sions (verses 7 and 17) “ En-Mishpat, 
which is Kadesh.” “Shaveh, which is 
the King’s Dale.” It should, however, be 
observed that the word “EmeJc,” trans¬ 
lated “vale,” is usually employed for a 
long, broad valley, such as in this con- 


Overthrow 
of Sodom 
and Go¬ 
morrah. 


284 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


The Dead 
Sea. 


out, there is no reason, either in Scripture or history, for 
supposing that the cities themselves were destroyed by 
submersion, or were submerged at all; and the mode of 
the catastrophe is emphatically and repeatedly described 
to be not water, but fire. Further than this it is im¬ 
possible to determine without more exact knowledge than 
we now possess. 

A great mass of legend and exaggeration, partly the 
effect, partly the cause of the old belief that the cities 
were buried under the Dead Sea, has been gradually 
removed in recent years. The glittering surface of the 
lake, with the thin mist of its own evaporations floating 
over its surface, will now no more be taken for a gloomy 
sea, sending forth sulphureous exhalations. The birds 
which pass over it without injury have long ago destroyed 
the belief that no living creature could survive the baneful 
atmosphere which hung upon its waters. And, although 
we cannot accept without further confirmation the traces 
of sites w^hich M. De Saulcy believes that he has 
recently discovered, yet there is nothing incredible in 
the fact that he should have at least found what were 
considered as the vestiges of the five devoted cities in the 
time of Josephus, Strabo, Tacitus, and of the writers of the 
New Testament, “set forth for an example, suffering the 
vengeance of eternal fire,” 1 —not beneath the waters of 
the lake, but on its barren shores. 

But it has still its manifold interest, both physical and 
historical. Viewed merely in a scientific point of view, 
it is one of the most remarkable spots of the world. First, 
it may be regarded as one of the most curious of inland seas. 
It is thirteen hundred feet below the level of the Mediter¬ 
ranean Sea, and thus the most depressed sheet of water in 
the world; as the Lake Sir-i-kol, 2 where the Oxus rises,— 

“ In his high mountain cradle in Pamere,” 


nection would naturally mean the whole a sheet of water fourteen miles long 
length of the Dead Sea. See Appendix. and one mile broad, on the high table- 

1 Josephus, Bell. Jud. IV. viii. 4; land called by the natives “ Bam-i- 

Strabo, xvi.; Tacit. Hist. v. 7. Jude 7. duniah,” “ the roof of the world,”—a 

2 The Lake Sirikol is 15,600 feet name not unfitly applied to the water- 

above the level of the sea—that is shed of the Indus and Oxus. (Milner, 

nearly as high as Mont Blanc—and is in Petermann’s Physical Atlas, p. 14.) 



THE J0EDAN AND THE DEAD SEA. 


285 


is the most elevated. Its basin is a steaming cauldron,—a 
bowl, as it has been well described, which, from the peculiar 
temperature and deep cavity in which it is situated, can 
never be filled to overflowing. The river, itself exposed 
to the same withering influences, is not'copious enough to 
furnish a supply equal to the demand made by the rapid 
evaporation. Further, this basin is the Gordian knot 
of all the theories which have been raised to account for 
the phenomena of the Jordan-valley. - From the moment 
that Burckhardt discovered the valley of the Arabah 
between the Dead Sea and the Red Sea, an hypothesis 
was naturally formed that this had been the original outlet 
of the Jordan into the latter sea, till its waters were 
detained by the sudden formation of the Dead Sea in the 
same convulsion, as it was supposed, that overthrew the 
five cities. But this theory is no longer tenable, since it 
has been found that the waters of the Arabah flow into 
the Dead Sea from a watershed almost midway between 
the two seas, and that the Gulf of Akaba is thirty-five feet 
higher than the Mediterranean, namely, more than thirteen 
hundred feet above the Dead Sea and Jordan-valley. It 
is clear that the cavity of the Dead Sea belongs to the same 
general conformation of country that produced both the 
Valley of the Jordan and the Arabah, and that therefore its 
first formation must be traced to a period long before his¬ 
torical times. A convulsion of such magnitude as not only to 
create a new lake, but to depress the Valley of the Jordan 
many hundred feet below r the level of the Mediterranean, 
and elevate the valley of the Arabah considerably above 
that level, must have shattered Palestine to its centre, and 
left upon the historical traditions of the time an indelible 
impression, of which, it is needless to say, not a trace is 
actually to be found. It seems to be concluded as most 
probable, that the whole valley, from the base of Hermon 
to the Red Sea, was once an arm of the Indian Ocean, 
which has gradually subsided, leaving the three lakes in 
its bed, with their connecting river. 1 

l “ The valley of the Ghor, which is from the southern roots of Libanus 
a vast longitudinal crevasse in cal- and Anti-Libanus to the Gulf of Akaba, 
careous and volcanic rocks extending from 1000 to 2000 feet deep, and from 


Its depth. 




286 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


Its saltness. 


But, in connection with the Sacred History, its exces¬ 
sive saltness 1 is even more remarkable than its deep 
depression. This peculiarity is, it is believed, mainly occa¬ 
sioned by the huge barrier of fossil-salt which closes its 
southern end, and heightened by the rapid evaporation 
of the fresh water poured into it. Other like phenomena, 
though in a less striking form, exist elsewhere. In the 
Old World there are two great series of salt-lakes to be 
found. One is that which extends along the table-lands 
of Central Asia, of which the chief are the Caspian, 
the Aral, the Urumia, the Roozla, and the Elton. The 
other is that which, beginning in the Yerde Islands, 
appears at irregular intervals along the great African 
Desert, till it terminates in this-—the last and most eastern 
of the series . 2 In the New World the great salt-lake of 
Utah by its physical likeness to its Syrian prototype, has 
actually confirmed the belief of the Mormon settlers that 
on its shores they have found a second Land of Promise, 
and in its river a second Jordan. But, without entering 
into its wider relations, this aspect is important as that 
which most forcibly impressed the Sacred writers. To them 
it was the “ salt sea,” and nothing more. They exhibit 
hardly a trace of the exaggerations of later times. And 


one to eight miles broad [this is under¬ 
stated], appears to have been caused by 
the forcible rending and falling in of 
the aqueous strata, resulting from the 
eruption and elevation of the basalt 
which bases it almost from its com¬ 
mencement to the Dead Sea. . . . 
Watery corrosion or abrasion can have 
had little influence in its formation. 
The great alterations in its surface com¬ 
menced anterior to the historic period, 
and terminated probably in the catas¬ 
trophe of Sodom.” (Newbold, Journal 
As. Soc. xvi. 23.) 

1 Milner, in Petermann’s Atlas, p. 30 ; 
Ansted’s Elementary Geology, p. 38. 
It is sometimes supposed that the 
Dead Sea is the saltest water in the 
world. This is not quite accurate. 
The scale seems to be as follows:— 
Rain-water is the purest of all, then 
river-water, then fresh-water lakes, 
then the Baltic and the Sea of Azof, 
then the Ocean, then the Mediterranean, 
then the Caspian and Aral, then the 


Dead Sea, last the Lakes of Elton and 
Urumia. The saline particles in the 
water of the ocean are 4 per cent. 
That of the Dead Sea contains 26£ per 
cent. That of Lake Elton (which is 
situated on the steppes east of the 
Volga, and supplies a great part of the 
salt of Russia) contains 29 per cent. 
The exact proportions of the waters of 
Lake Urumia are not stated. But 
Moritz Wagner, in his Travels in 
Persia, ii. 136, Leipsic, 1852, (quoted by 
Fallmerayer, Todte Meer, p. 54,) says 
that the salt and iodine of the water of 
this lake far surpass those of the Dead 
Sea. He also describes its exceeding 
buoyancy, and the fact, that whilst fish 
is found in neither lake, crustaceous 
animalculae are found in the Urumia, 
(p. 137,) as madrepores are said to have 
been in the Dead Sea. Humboldt’s 
Ansichten der Natur, ii. 91. Fall¬ 
merayer, p. 55. 

2 Ritter; Jordan, 766. 


THE JORDAN AND THE DEAD SEA. 


so it is in Tact. It is not gloom, but desolation, which 
is the prevailing characteristic of the Sea of Death. 
Follow the course of the Jordan to its end. How 
different from the first burst of its waters in Mount 
Hermon, amongst the groves of Dan and Paneas ! 1 How 
different from the “ riotous prodigality of life ” which 
has marked its downward course, almost to the very 
termination of its existence ! Gradually, within the last 
mile from the Dead Sea, its verdure dies away, and 
the river melts into its grave in a tame and sluggish 
stream, still, however, of sufficient force to carry its brown 
waters far into the bright green sea. Along the desert- 
shore, the white crust of salt indicates the cause of its 
sterility. Thus the few living creatures which the Jordan 
washes down into its waters, are destroyed. Hence 
arises the unnatural buoyancy and the intolerable nausea 
to taste and touch, which raise to the highest pitch the 
contrast between its clear, bitter waves and the soft, 
fresh, turbid stream of its parent river. Strewn along 
its desolate margin lie the most striking memorials of this 
last conflict of life and death ; trunks and branches of trees, 
torn down from the thickets of the river-jungle by the 
violence of the Jordan, thrust out into the sea, and thrown 
up again by its waves, dead and barren as itself. The dead 
beach—so unlike the shell-covered shores of the two seas 
between which it lies, the Sea of Tiberias and the Gulf of 
Akaba—shelves gradually into the calm waters. A deep 
haze—that which, to earlier ages, gave the appearance 
of “the smoke going up for ever and ever,”—veils its 
southern extremity, and almost gives it the dim horizon of a 
real sea. 2 In the nearer view rises the low island close to its 
northern end, and the long promontory projecting from 
the eastern side, which divides it into its two unequal 
parts. This is all that I saw, and all that most pilgrims 
and travellers have seen of the Dead Sea. Beyond, at 
its southern end, rises the mountain of rock-salt; and on 
its sides are still seen the columnar fragment or fragments 

1 See Chapter XT. ' the subterraneous exit of the Jordan. 

2 Compare the poetical expressions of The Midrash says “it goes out of the 
Isai. xxxiv. 10, Rev. xiv. 11. Schwarze Dead Sea into the mouth of the 
(pp. 44, 45,) repeats the old story about Leviathan.” 

the birds—also the sulphur smoke, and 




288 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


standing out from it, doubtless the same appearance as 
that which Josephus describes as the pillar of Lot’s wife, 
existing in his own day, 1 and seen by himself. 

Often as the sea has been described by later writers, 
classical and modern, there is but one passage in the Old 
Testament where its peculiarities are fully brought before 
vision of us. In the vision which reveals to Ezekiel the regeneration 
Ezekiel. 0 f the kingdom of God, the Prophet in the Temple-court 
sees the perennial spring of the Sacred Hill rising into a 
full and overflowing fountain beside the altar, and pouring 
forth a vast stream over the wide enclosure. He goes 
round to the eastern gate of the Temple, overhanging the 
defile of Kedron,—the waters have reached the gateway, 
and are rushing in a cataract down into the valley below. 
Into the valley the Prophet descends ; and the waters 
rise higher and higher, till the dry course 2 of Kedron 
becomes a mighty river ; and innumerable trees spring up 
along its sterile banks,—and through the deep defile, and its 
tributary courses, the waters issue out toward the ‘ circles ’ 3 
of the Jordan; they “go down” through all the long descent 
into the ‘ desert-plain' 4 of Jordan, and reach the “sea.” And 
when the stream—one, yet divided 5 as it rushes through the 
mountain-passes—forces its way into that dead lake, “ the 
waters shall be healed; ” everywhere they shall teem with 
life ; the living creatures, washed by the Jordan into the sea, 
which else would die at once, shall live as the fresh stream 
touches them ; there shall be a multitude of fish, even as 
“ the fish of the great sea”—the Mediterranean; the fisher¬ 
men standing all along its rocky shores from En-eglaim 
to En-gedi ; only the marshes at its southern end, where 
the healing stream cannot penetrate, will still be given 
up to its old salt and barrenness. The imagery of this 
vision is often used in illustration of the spread of philan¬ 
thropic or missionary beneficence ; but its full force, as 
the Prophet first delivered it, can only be appreciated by 


1 Lynch’s Expedition. Josephus, Ant., 
I. xi. 4. 

2 Ezek. xlvii. 5, 6, 7, “Nachal,” trans¬ 
lated “ river.” 

3 “ Geliloth,” translated “ country,” 

verse 8. 


4 “ Arabah ”—the word always used 
for “ the Ghor,” verse 8. 

5 Nachalaim, “ the two torrents,” ver. 
9. Possibly down the two defiles of 
Jericho and of St. Saba. 


THE JORDAN AND THE DEAD SEA. 


289 


those who have seen the desolate basin of the Salt Sea, 
and marked the features of its strange vicinity. 

There is one peculiarity, to which I have before adverted, En-gedi. 
which would naturally suggest some of the details of this 
striking imagery,—the abundance of copious springs which 
from the limestone hills of Palestine pour forth their waters 
into the Jordan-valley. Two of them are mentioned 
by name in this very description. One, En-eglaim, “ the 
spring of calves,” is named only here, but is probably the 
same as the hot spring at the north-east end of the Dead 
Sea, known by the name of Callirhoe, to which Herod the 
Great resorted in his last illness for its healing virtues. 

The other is the more celebrated En-gedi, the one spot 
of life besides the five cities which has from age to age 
maintained an independent existence and interest on the 
shores of the Dead Sea. 1 Midway 2 on the western bank of 
the lake, the clear stream breaks out on a high platform 
elevated 400 feet above the shore, and, scattering rich 
vegetation all around, descends through the cliffs to the 
sea. This is En-gedi, “ the spring of the wild goats, 
or gazelles/' so called from the numerous ibexes, or 
Syrian chamois, which inhabit these cliffs. The oasis 
which it forms amidst the naked limestone precipices 
was the site of the ancient city, known by the name of 
the “ city of palms,” or of “ the cutting of palms,” 3 
(Hazazon-Tamar), doubtless from the grove of palms which 
then stood, but which has since entirely disappeared, 
around the rushing fountain. There, at the time of 
Chedorlaomer’s great invasion, the settlement of Amo- 
rites was attacked by the Assyrian army, immediately 
before its descent into the plain and final victory 
over the kings of the five cities. In that same fastness 
dwelt, as it would seem, in later times, a branch 
of the Kenite tribe, 4 in “ the city of palms,” their eagle's 

1 En-gedi I did not see. There is the children of Judah into the wilder- 

a full description of it in Robinson, ness of Judah, which lieth in the south 
ii. 209—215. It was first discovered of Arad.” (Judges, i. 16.) The “ city 
by Seetzen in 1806. of palms” may, of course, be Jericho, 

2 Plin. v. 17; Solin. 38. But Lightfoot (ii. 7.) justly contends 

3 Gen. xiv. 7; 2 Chr. xx. 2. that it may with equal propriety be 

4 “ The children of the Kenite went En-gedi; which, much more naturally 
up out of the city of palm-trees with suits the context, and agrees with 

U 




290 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


Plain and 
Terraces of 
tlie Jordan 
Valley. 


“nest” “in the ‘cliffs'”—in the numerous caverns with 
which the cliffs of En-gedi abound. And in those same 
caverns David afterwards with his followers took refuge ; 
and yet again, at a still later time, the first hermits of 
Palestine—the solitary sect of the Essenes—had their 
chief seat at En-gedi; as afterwards the earliest Christian 
monastery of Palestine was planted not far distant, 
in the valley of the Kedron,—the romantic Convent of 
St. Saba. 

II. The history of the Jordan gradually carries us 
upwards on its course. In order to understand fully the 
scenes which follow, we must form an accurate con¬ 
ception of its stage between the Dead Sea and the Sea 
of Galilee. Through this whole interval, the river runs 
between successive terraces, one, two, or three, accord¬ 
ing as the hills approach more or less near to its 
banks. It is crossed by three, or at most four, well- 
known fords. The first and second are marked by 
remains of Roman bridges, immediately below the Sea 
of Galilee, and again, immediately above its confluence 
with the Jabbok; 1 the third and fourth immediately 
above and below the present bathing-place of the 
pilgrims opposite Jericho. 2 No important streams join 
it on its western side; on its eastern side two, of almost 
equal magnitude, the Hieromax and the Jabbok. It is 
below the confluence of the latter stream that the rapid 
descent 3 begins. What may be its general character 
above this point is little known. But, south of the 
confluence, it begins to wear the aspect well-known to 
all travellers, and important in connection with the his¬ 
torical events which it has witnessed. The higher 
terraces on each side, immediately under the ranges 
of mountains, are occupied by masses of vegetation, 
of which I shall have occasion to speak again more 
particularly. This region is succeeded by the desert- 

Balaam’s allusion, in Numbers, xxiv, Kenites on the shore of the Gulf of 

21, “ Strong is thy dwelling-place, and Akaba, or to the wide upland desert 

thou puttest thy nest in the ‘ cliff/ *' as where they were afterwards found 

appropriate to a place within his view, south of Judsea. 

abounding in caverns and rocks, as it 1 For the bridges, see Schwarze, 49. 

would be inappropriate either to the 2 Van de Velde, ii. 348. 

original seat of the great body of the 3 Lynch, 284. 


THE JORDAN AND THE DEAD SEA. 


291 


plain, or “ Arabah,” properly so called, and from this 
desert-plain begin the regular descents to the bed of the 
Jordan. Of these, the first is over a long line of white 
argillaceous hills, somewhat resembling those in the Wady 
Feiran, down to a flat occupied chiefly with low shrubs of 
agnus-castus. The second descent is upon a still lower 
flat, occupied chiefly with a jungle of tamarisks and 
willows, and this last flat is, in most parts of the river's 
course, the bed of the river itself. Nearer its mouth, 
there is yet a third descent, consisting of a brake of canes 
and reeds. The actual stream of the Jordan, as it flows 
between these banks, is from sixty to a hundred feet wide, 
and varies from six to four feet in depth. Where it is 
widest, the bottom is mud ; where narrowest, rock or 
sand. 1 Of these terraces the only one, probably, which 
is continuous through its whole course, is that of the 
jungle. The canes and reeds higher up the stream cease 
to form a continuous brake. The argillaceous hills on the 
eastern side approach so near the river, that they probably 
occupy the place of the highest terrace of agnus-castus on 
the west. But the long line of the jungle never ceases, 

1 and, as the valley contracts in its upper channel, sometimes 
! extends across its whole width. 2 

1. The course of the river, thus diversified, is confined 
between the two ranges of hills, which, like those of the 
Nile-valley, extend with more or less regularity along the 
shores of the Dead Sea, and even to the Gulf of Akaba. 
In most parts of the Jordan, the plain thus enclosed is not 
more than eight miles in breadth, but immediately above 
the Dead Sea the mountains on each side retire, leaving a 
larger plain than usual ; probably a distance of more 
than twelve miles across from range to range. It is this 
plain which becomes the scene of the next great events in 
the history of the river; and it is fortunately that of which 
the physical features are best known to travellers. We 
must imagine the Israelite host encamped on its eastern 
side. The place is so minutely specified, that it may 
be fixed in spite of the obscurity which still rests on 


Plain of 

Abel-Shit* 

tira. 


Encamp¬ 
ment of the 
Israelites. 


1 Newbold, Journal of R. As. Soc. xvi. 21. 


2 Lynch, 228. 
u 2 




292 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


the further hank of the Jordan . 1 It was in the “ desert- 
plains” of Moab, so called, probably, in contradistinction to 
the cultivated “ fields ” on the tableland above. It was 
in the long belt of acacia groves ( shittim ) which, on the 
eastern as on the western side of the Jordan, mark with 
a line of verdure the upper terraces of the valley. These 
groves indicate at once the issue of the springs from the 
roots of the eastern hills , 2 and the tropical climate to which 
the Israelites had now descended, and which brought them 
under these wild and thorny shades—probably for the first 
time since they had left them in the wilderness of Sinai. 
Their tents were pitched “ from Abel-Shittim on the north 
to Beth-Jeshimoth on the south ; ” 3 from the ‘ meadow ’ 4 
which marked the limit of those ‘ groves/ to the ‘ hamlet’ 
or ‘house ’ 5 which stood in the ‘waste’ on the shores of the 
Bead Sea. They looked straight across the Jordan to the 
green spot of Jericho 6 on the western bank. High above 
them rose the mountains to which their descendants gave 
the name of “ Abarim,”—‘ those on the further side,’—the 
eastern wall of the valley—on whose tops they had so long 
sojourned, in their long struggle with the Amorites of 
Heshbon. 

From these lofty summits were unfolded two succes¬ 
sive views 7 —of the valley below, of the camp, of the 


1 In Deut. i. 1, the scene of the 
last words of Moses is described as 
“ on the ‘ other ’ side Jordan in the 
wilderness, in the ‘desert’ ‘before’ the 
[sea of] ‘Weeds,’ between Paran and 
Tophel, and Laban, and Hazeroth (LXX 
AvXuv), and Dizahab (KaTaxpvata — 
“place of gold.”) The difficulty here is, 
that whereas the expression, “ on the 
* other ’ side Jordan confirmed by i. 5, 
(“on the ‘other’ sid e Jordan in the land 
of Moab”) fixes the scene to the north 
of the Dead Sea, all the other locali¬ 
ties indicated are in the Arabah, south 
of the Dead Sea. Hengstenberg’s ex¬ 
planation, quoted by Dr. Robinson ii. 
600, only evades the difficulty. 

2 These springs and roots of the 
eastern hills are designated as 
“ Ashdoth-Pisgah,” “ the issuings forth 
of Pisgah.” See Appendix. 

3 Numb, xxxiii. 49. 

4 A6e£-Shittim (“meadow of the aca¬ 


cias”) of which the name is preserved 
in “Abila,” is described by Josephus as 
still existing in his time on the spot, 
embosomed in palms, at the distance of 
six miles or more (60 stadia) from the 
Jordan. (Ant. IV. viii. 1; V. i. 1.) Pos¬ 
sibly it is the same as appears once or 
twice in the Jewish war. (Bell. Jud. II. 
xiii. 2 ; IV. vii. 6.) 

5 Beth-Jeshimoth is the “house of 
the waste.” Its southern position is 
fixed by the place which it holds in the 
enumeration of the towns of Reuben, 
(Joshua, xiii. 20.) Compare Josephus, 
Bell. Jud. IV. vii. 6. 

6 “ ‘ On ’ or ‘above ’ Jordan ‘of’ Je¬ 
richo.” So this lowest stage of the river 
seems to have been called. (Numb, 
xxii. 1.) 

7 The account of these views more 
properly belongs to the next chapter. 
But the historical connection will be best 
understood by their introduction here. 


THE JORDAN AND THE DEAD SEA. 


293 


opposite hills—awakening thoughts most diverse to the 
two seers, but of almost equal interest to future times. 
From the “ high places ” 1 there dedicated to Baal, from 
the 4 bare hill’ 2 3 on 44 the top of the rocks,” and lastly, 
from the cultivated 3 44 field ” of Zophim, on 44 the top of 
Pisgah,” 44 from the top of Peor, that looketh 4 on the face of 
the waste,’ ” 4 the Assyrian Prophet, with the King of 
Moab by his side, looked over the wide prospect: — 

“ He watch’d, till morning’s ray 
On lake and meadow lay. 

And willow-shaded streams 5 that silent sweep 
Amid their banner’d lines, 

Where, by their several signs, 

The desert-wearied tribes in sight of Canaan sleep.” 

He saw in that vast encampment amongst the acacia 
groves, 44 how goodly are thy tents, 0 Jacob, and thy 
tabernacles, 0 Israel.” Like the watercourses of the 
mountains, like gardens by the side of his own great river 
Euphrates, 6 with their aromatic shrubs, and their wide- 
spreading cedars—the lines of the camp were spread out 
before him. Ephraim, was there with 44 the strength of the 
wild bull” of the north ; Judah, 44 couching like the lion ” 
of the south; 44 a people dwelling alone,” yet a mighty 
nation— 44 who can count the dust of Jacob, and the 
number of the fourth part of Israel 1 ” He looked round 
from his high post over the table-lands of Moab, 7 to the 
line of mountains stretching away to Edom, on the south 8 
—over the high platform of the Desert beyond the Dead 
Sea, where dwelt the tribe of Amalek, 9 then 44 first of the 


1 Numb. xxii. 41. 

2 “ Skefi” (rendered “high place”) 
Numb, xxiii. 3, 9. 

3 Numb, xxiii. 14. 

4 Numb, xxiii. 28. 

5 Probably few readers of “The 
Christian Year” enter into the accurate 
learning displayed in these lines. The 

“ lake ” and “ meadow ” have been 

sufficiently explained in what has 
just been said. The “willow-shaded 
streams,” though not absolutely 

grounded on known fact, is yet an 

extremely probable description of the 
streams under the mountains of Pisgah. 
The torrent of Zared, a little further 
south, is so called from this circum¬ 


stance, and the streams which, under 
a somewhat similar climate, fall into 
the lake of Genesareth from the W&dy 
Hymam, are exactly of this character. 

6 N umb. xxiv. 6. The words “ the 
river,” “Aa-nahar,” with the allusion to 
the aromatic plants (translated aloes) and 
the cedars on the water-side,—neither of 
them images drawn from the scene before 
him,—show that he is thinking of his 
own country. There is the same com¬ 
parison of Assyria to the cedar, by 
the riverside of the Tigris, in Ezekiel, 
xxxi. 4. 

7 Numb. xxiv. 17. 

8 Numb. xxiv. 18. 

9 Numb. xxiv. 20. 


View from 
Pisgah. 


The view of 
Balaam. 


294 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


nations"—over the Kenite, not yet removed from his 
clefts in the rocks of En-gedi , 1 full in front of the Prophet's 
view. And for each his dirge of lamentation went up; 
till at the thought of his own distant land of‘ Asshur’— 
of the land beyond the Euphrates 2 —of the dim vision 
of ships coming from the Western sea which lay behind 
the hills of Palestine, “to afflict Asshur and to afflict 
Eber"—he burst into the bitter cry, “Alas, who shall 
live when God doeth this ! " and he rose up, and returned 
to his place. 

The view of Balaam from the top of Pisgah and of Peor 
is the first of those which have made the name cele¬ 
brated. But it is the second view, which within so short 
a time succeeded to it, whilst Israel was still encamped 
in the acacia groves, that has become a proverb through- 
The view of out wor ^- To these same mountains of Abarim , 3 
Moses. to the top of Pisgah—to a high-place dedicated to the 
heathen Nebo, as Balaam’s standing-place had been con¬ 
secrated to Peor—“Moses went up from the ‘ desert-plain 9 
of Moab . . . over against Jericho." 4 In the long line of 
those eastern mountains, which so constantly meet the 
view of the traveller in all the western parts of Palestine, 
the eye vainly strives to discern any point emerging from 
this horizontal platform, which may be fixed as the top 
of Nebo. Nothing but a fuller description than has ever 
yet been given of these regions, can determine the spot 
where the great lawgiver and leader of his people looked 
down upon their embattled ranks, and over the “land 
which he was to see with his eyes, but was not to go in 
thither.” But the general, account leaves no doubt that the 
place intended is some elevation immediately above the 
last stage of the Jordan . 5 Northward, his eye turned 

1 Numb. xxiv. 21. Journal of American Oriental Society 

2 Numb. xxiv. 22, 24. “ Asshur” of ii. 245.) See Chapter XII. 

course is Assyria. “ Eber” is the “people 3 It must have been the name of the 

beyond the Euphrates.” “Chittim” is whole eastern range. See Num. xxi. 

the west, represented by the island of 11, and xxxiii. 44, 47. 

Cyprus—the only island visible from 4 Deut. xxxiv. 1. 

the heights of Syria. On a clear 6 * * De Saulcy vainly endeavours to 

evening at sunset it is visible “ in transfer the top of Pisgah to the western 

the midst of the great wide sea,” from side of the Dead Sea, seeking the name 
the range of Lebanon above the sources in Feshkah. It is true that no name 
of the Zahrany. (Forest’s Narrative in like Pisgah is now known on the 


THE JORDAN AND THE DEAD SEA. 


295 


to “all the land of Gilead,” continuing the same eastern 
barrier as that on which himself stood, till it ended, far 
beyond his sight, in Dan. Westward, there were on the 
northern horizon, the distant hills of “all Naphtali” 
Coming nearer, was “the land of Ephraim and Manas- 
seh ” Immediately opposite, was “ all the land of Judah ; ” 
beyond which, though unseen, lay “ the utmost sea ” and 
the Desert of “the south,”—Jerusalem 1 itself, in all 
probability, distinctly visible through the opening of the 
descent to Jericho. These were the four great masses 
of the future inheritance of his people, on which the nar¬ 
rative fixes our attention. Immediately below him was the 
‘circle’ of the plain of Jericho, with its oasis of palm-trees, 
and far away on his left, though hardly visible, the last 
inhabited spot before the great Desert—“ Zoar .” 2 It was 
a view, doubtless, which in its full extent was to be 
imagined rather than actually seen. In this respect the 
Pisgah-prospect is a striking illustration of all the pro¬ 
phetic visions of the Sacred writings. The foreground of 
the picture alone was clearly discernible; its dim distances 
were to be supplied by what was beyond, though suggested 
by what was within, the range of the actual prospect of 
the seer. But between him and that “good land” the 
deep valley of the Jordan intervened. “ So Moses the 
servant of the Lord died there in the land of Moab, 
according to the word of the Lord.” In language less 
simple, but hardly less touching, the Jewish historian adds 
—“As he was bidding farewell to Eleazer and Joshua, 
whilst he was yet talking with them, a cloud suddenly 


eastern side ; but Jerome expressly 
asserts that it was familiar to the tra¬ 
vellers of his day (De loc. Heb., voc. 
Abarim ) and that Nebo was pointed out 
six miles from Heshbon (lb. voc. Ndbari) 
“ ad orientalem plagam” . . [probably 
we must read occidentalem plagam—as 
vice versd of Tabor, it is said occidenta¬ 
lem plagam Legionis, where it should 
be orientalem plagam.'] Burckhardt in 
travelling the country selected Gebel 
Attarous, apparently from its con¬ 
spicuous position, as the most likely 
spot. “ There is,” he says, “ a large 
heap of stones on the summit, over¬ 
shaded by a wild pistachio tree.” He 


also describes the mountain “ as very 
barren,” and “ with an uneven plain on 
the top.” But he gives no details by 
which to judge of its general appear¬ 
ance, nor the slightest indication of the 
view from the top. (Travels in Syria, 
i. p. 372). It is true that this is not 
strictly “ over against Jericho,” but this 
objection would not be fatal if the spot 
were otherwise appropriate. 

1 So large a portion of these moun¬ 
tains is visible from Jerusalem, that 
Jerusalem must in turn be visible from 
most of their summits. 

2 I have dwelt on the points ex¬ 
pressly mentioned in Deut. xxxiv. 1—3. 


296 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


13ii rial- 
place of 
Moses. 


stood over him, and he vanished 1 in a ravine.” “He 
died in the mount whither he had gone up, and he 
was gathered unto his people, as Aaron his brother had 
died on Mount Hor, and was gathered to his people.” 
His tomb, however, was not, like Aaron’s, on the high 
mountain summit, an object of pilgrimage for future 
ages. “ He died in the land of Moab, according to the 
word of the Lord, and he buried him in a ‘ ravine ’ in the 
land of Moab before Bethpeor, but no man knoweth of 
his sepulchre unto this day.” In a ravine before Beth¬ 
peor,—that is, in front of the height from which Balaam’s 
last prophecy had been delivered; and so, doubtless, 
somewhere in the gorges 2 of Pisgah. But beyond this, 
“ no man knew.” It is the first instance on record of the 
providential obliteration—so remarkably exemplified after¬ 
wards in the Gospel history—of the “ holy places ” of 
Palestine ; the providential safeguard against their 
elevation to a sanctity which might endanger the real 
holiness of the history and religion which they served 
to commemorate. It is curious that, in spite of the 
mystery in which the grave of Moses was thus enveloped, 
a traditional sanctuary has arisen, not indeed on Mount 
Pisgah, but on a height immediately on the opposite 
side of the Dead Sea—a rude mosque, which is reverenced 
by the Mussulman world, as covering the tomb of “ the 
Prophet Moses .” 3 It is so sacred, that, lonely as its 
situation is, its entrance is rigidly barred against unbe¬ 
lievers, and its votaries are so numerous that the autho¬ 
rities of Jerusalem have, by a stroke of policy, fixed the 
days of the pilgrimage thither at the same time as the 
Greek Easter; so that at the very moment when Jerusalem 
might, it was feared, be in danger of a surprise from the 
influx of Christian pilgrims, a body of Mussulman pilgrims 
might be on the spot to defend the Holy City. 

1 Josephus, Ant. IV. viii. 48. elusive in favour of its being intended 

2 Such a ‘ravine’ is mentioned in for the grave of Moses. There have 
connection with Bamoth, or the high been no “ Prophets ” since the death of 
places near Pisgah, in Num. xxi. 20. Mahomet. Such is also the opinion of 

3 Nebi-Mousa; see De Saulcy, ii. 73. Jelal-ed-din (p. 390). “Hardby,”he ac- 
Van Egmont (i. 345) speaks of this curately notices, “ is a red-sand mound 
tomb, as of a modern Mussulman saint. by the road side.” There is another grave 
But the prefix of “ Nebi ” is nearly con- of Moses near Hams (Schwarze 64). 


THE JORDAN AND THE DEAD SEA. 


297 


From the heights of Pisgah we descend again to the 
encampment in the groves which had just witnessed the 
licentious rites of Midian. 1 And now the day was come 
for the greatest crisis that had taken place since the 
passage of the Red Sea. They were to “ pass over the 
Jordan, to go in and possess the land which the Lord 
their God gave them to possess it/’ 2 For the first time, 
they descended from the upper terraces of the valley— 
“ they removed from the ‘ acacia groves/ ”—and “ came to 
the Jordan, and lodged 3 there before they passed over/’ 
The exact spot is unknown; it certainly cannot be 
that which the Greek tradition has fixed, where the 
eastern banks are sheer precipices, of ten or fifteen feet 
high. Probably it was either immediately above or below, 
where the cliffs break away ; above, at the fords, or 
below, where the river assumes the tamer character which 
has been before described, on its exit to the Dead Sea. 
Wherever was the point, however, it must have been the 
largest river that they had seen since they left the banks 
of the Nile ; the largest even in its ordinary state, still 
more evidently so, if we take to the full the expression of 
the historian, that the Jordan was then in a state of 
flood—“ overflowing all his banks at the time of the barley 
harvest.” It was the same phenomenon which is described 
again in David’s reign, when the adventurous Gadites 
passed the stream—“ in the first month, when it had over¬ 
flowed all its banks.” 4 The time of the year, which must 
have corresponded to our April or May, is the same as that 


Passage of 
the Jordan. 


The Inun¬ 
dation. 


1 Numb. sxv. 1. 2 Josh. i. 11. 

3 Josh. iii. 1. 

4 1 Chr. xii. 15. The time is fixed 
by the “ first month, ” the barley-har¬ 
vest, and “ four days before the Pass- 
over.” (Comp. Josh. iv. 19, and v. 10.) 
The English expedition down the Jordan 
speaks of the flood in winter as extend¬ 
ing for the width of half a mile. (Journal 
of Geological Society, xviii. 116.) The 
question of the flood is well stated 
by Captain Newbold, who thinks 
that it never has risen in historical 
times above the lowest of the present 
terraces; but describes “ the northern 
end of the whole valley as spread with 
a soft black alluvium, like that of the 


Nile. . . . The venerable trees and 
thick bushes which now occupy the 
wider channel, show that a considerable 
period has elapsed since the Jordan 
filled it as a current . It is subject to 
sudden rises from violent and sudden 
rains in the mountains around its 
sources, and in the Hauran and eastern 
mountains, south of Tiberias, the drain¬ 
age of which is conveyed to the Jordan 
by the Hieromax and Jabbok, in conse¬ 
quence of which the passage of the 
river below the embouchure of these 
two streams is always uncertain and 
dangerous, especially for troops. . . . 
Above, the two upper lakes act as 
regulators.” (Journal As. Soc. 24). 


298 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


when it is usually visited by travellers; and as no extensive 
inundation has ever been witnessed by them, it is probable 
that the utmost that can be here implied is the rise of the 
river to the top of the lowest of its terraces, that, namely, 
which is occupied by the jungle ; and the difference 
between this increase and what is now witnessed may be 
either from the river having worn a deeper channel, or 
from the greater fall of rain in earlier times, or from both 
causes combined. That there was such an increase, re¬ 
ceives a slight confirmation in the fact that the remains 
of an ancient dyke have been observed at the issue of the 
river from the southern end of the Sea of Tiberias . 1 That 
it could not, however, have been very great, is indicated 
both by the passage of the Gadites under the same cir¬ 
cumstances in the time of David, and also by the double 
passage 2 of the spies only four days before. 

The drying On the broken edge of the river—so the scene which 
river the f°H° ws is placed before us by the narrative—the band of 
priests stood with the Ark upon their shoulders. At a 
distance of nearly a mile 3 in the rear, stood the great mass 
of the army. Suddenly the full bed of the Jordan was 
dried before them. High up the river—“very far”—“in 
Adam, the city which is beside Zaretan,” 4 —that is, at a 
distance of nearly thirty miles from the place of the 
Israelite encampment, “ the waters which came down from 
above,” from the Sea of Galilee, stood, and rose up in a 
barrier ; 5 and “those that came down towards the sea of 
the ‘ Desert/ the salt sea, failed and were cut off.” The 
scene presented to us, therefore, is of the river-bed dried up 
from north to south, as far as the eye could reach—an 
image which, however it may be explained, is important 


1 Light’s Travels, p. 206. 

2 Josh. ii. 1,23. 

3 Two thousand cubits. Josh. iii. 4. 

4 The city of “ Adam ” is only named 

here. But the situation of Zaretan is 
fixed by a comparison with 1 Kings 
vii. 46, to have been near Succoth at 
the ford of the river near the mouth of 
the Jabbok. Nor is this altered by the 
substitution of “Kirjath-jarim” in the 
LXX., which in this place is possibly 
the same as “ Kirjathaim,” Josh. xiii. 19. 


5 The word here used, “ Ned,” is 
only used of “water” with regard 
to the Jordan here; and of the waves 
of the sea poetically. (Ps. xxxiii. 7, 
Ps. lxxviii. 13, Exod. xv. 8.) The appear¬ 
ance of the drying up of the Jordan 
seems to be described by Antoninus 
Martyr in the sixth century, as if it 
occurred yearly at the visit of the 
pilgrims. See King’s Morsels of Cri¬ 
ticism, i. p. 281. 


THE JOED AN AND THE DEAD SEA. 

to bear in mind, to avoid a confused notion which is often 
formed from a supposed parallel with the account of the 
Red Sea. Then “ they came up out of 99 the deep channel 
of the Jordan, and pitched their tents in the “ desert- 
plains” which immediately succeed on its western side to the 
lines of vegetation that accompany the course of the river. 

2. The first stage of the conquest of Palestine, 
which now follows, cannot be understood without fully 
representing the situation of Jeeicho, one of the most 
important cities of Palestine, the capital, as it may be 
called, of the Valley of the Jordan, and the only important 
city in its whole course. That importance is derived 
from two causes. First, it stands at the entrance of 
the main passes from this valley into the interior of 
Palestine, the one branching off to the south-west towards 
Olivet, which commands the approach to Jerusalem, 
the other to the north-east, towards Michmash, which 
commands the approach to Ai and Bethel. 1 It was 
thus the key—the “ Chiavenna "■—of Palestine to any 
invader from this quarter. Secondly, it enjoys the full 
benefit of one, if not two, of those copious streams which, 
as we have seen, form the chief sources of such fertility as 
the Valley of the Jordan contains. The usual, that is the 
south-western, approach to Jericho exhibits this in the most 
striking form. After traversing for six hours the almost 
total desolation which marks the long descent from Jeru¬ 
salem to the Valley of the Jordan—over bare limestone 
hills—the eye is suddenly caught by the sight of a thread 
of verdure at the bottom of a deep glen, the most romantic 
in the whole of Palestine, almost recalling by its depth 
and narrowness the defile of the Sik on the approach to 
Petra. This green thread is the course of the torrent 
now called Kelt, possibly the ancient Cherith, 2 and, if so, 
doubtless deriving its name from the manner in which its 

1 See Chapter IV. Mahanaim, opposite Bethshan. (Comp. 

2 1 Kings xvii. 3. Eobinson, B. K. Irby and Mangles, p. 305, Schwarze, 
vol. ii. p. 288. There are two other 51.) But, if the word “ before” can be 
claimants to the honour of the Cherith. taken in the sense of “towards,” then 
If “ before,” in 1 Kings xvii. 3, retains the choice may still lie between the 
its usual signification of “east,” then Wady Kelt and the ’Ain Fasael, 
the most probable memorial of the a little north of the Wady Kelt. Of 
Cherith is in the Wady A lias south of this an excellent description, in some 


299 


Jericho. 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


course is “ cut ” through these tremendous precipices. 
To any one who has seen the Baracla, on the approach to 
Damascus, 1 the sight of the Wady Kelt at once suggests by 
anticipation the prospect which awaits him as he issues 
from the desert-hills. It bursts through the opening, and 
in the desert-plain of the Jordan, far and wide extends 
the green circle of tangled thickets, in the midst of which 
are the hovels of the modern village—beside which stood, 
in ancient times, the great city of Jericho. It is not, 
however, only or chiefly to the torrent stream of the 
Kelt, that Jericho owes its oasis. A little to the east 
of the issue of that stream into the plain, two living 
springs—one now, as always, called 2 Duk, the other and 
larger, as well as more celebrated, now called the spring 
“ of the Sultan,” once “ of Elisha,”—pour out of the foot of 
the same limestone-range, rills that trickle through glades 
of tangled forest-shrub, which, but for their rank luxu¬ 
riance and Oriental vegetation, almost recall the scenery 
of an English park. “As You Like It” says one of the 
most graphic and accurate of Eastern travellers, “ was in 
my head all day.” 3 It is these streams, 4 with their accom- 


respects well according with the scene 
in Elijah’s life, is given by Van de Velde 
(ii. 309). “A steep and rocky track 
of more than a thousand feet led us 
onward. The further we came down the 
warm and fiery wind from the Ghor met 
us right in the face. . . . The air itself 
seemed to be fire. ... And nature and 
we, all was burned. Thistles, grass, 
flowers, and shrubs grew here with 
rare luxuriance, but now everything 
was burned white like hay or straw, 
and this perhaps standing five or six 
feet high. My guides, as well as myself, 
thought we should die while in this 
gigantic furnace. At last we see living 
green. A thicket of wild fig trees and 
oak-shrubs mixed and intermixed with 
oleanders and thorny plants, seems as 
it were to hide itself at the base of the 
glowing rocks, keeping full vigour of 
life, notwithstanding the extraordi¬ 
nary heat. What may be the cause of 
this 1 It is a fountain of living waters 
which keeps the leaves of these ti’ees 
green, whilst everything round about 
is consumed by drought and heat. 

‘ This is Ain Fasael,’ said my guide. 


There is a distance of three quarters 
of an hour between the fountain 
and the end of the valley in the plain 
of the Jordan. The rocks on both 
sides of the valley contain a great 
many natural caves. The central part 
of the narrow valley had been culti¬ 
vated by aid of the brook. The 
cucumber gardens were yet green. . . . 
At the end of the valley stands a small 
‘ Tel ’ covered with ruins. This must 
have been the Acropolis—and in its 
name * Tel Fasael,’ it is not difficult 
to recognise the fortress Phasaelus, 
built by Herod, and called after his 
son.” For the tradition he refers to 
Bachiene (Heilige Geographie, p. 126, 
130) and Brocardus. 

1 See Chapter XII. 

2 1 Macc. xvi. 14, 15. 

3 Miss Martineau’s Eastern Travel, 
p. 485. In the time of the Ci-usades the 
sugar-cane was grown here, and near 
’Ain-Sultan, the sugai'-mills and their 
aqueducts in part remain. Newbold, 
in Journal As. Soc. xvi. 31. 

4 “ The water of Jei’icho,” Joshua, 
xvi. 1. 


THE JORDAN AND THE DEAD SEA, 


301 


panying richness, that procured for Jericho, during the 
various stages of its existence, its long prosperity and 
grandeur. 

Beautiful as the spot is now in utter neglect, it must 
have been far more so when it was first seen by the 
Israelite host at Gilgal. Gilgal—the rising ground 1 
where, at Joshua’s command, they “ rolled ” away the 
reproach of their uncircumcision—was about five miles 
distant from the river banks, at the eastern outskirts, 
therefore, of the great forest. Jericho itself stood at its 
western extremity, immediately where the springs issue 
from the hills. From that scene of their earliest settle¬ 
ment in Palestine, they looked out over the intervening 
forest to what was to be the first prize of the conquest. 
The forest itself did not then consist, as now, merely of 
the picturesque thorn, but was a vast grove of majestic 
palms, nearly three miles broad, and eight miles long. 
At Jericho, even the solitary relic of the palm-forest 2 — 
seen as late as 1838—has now disappeared. But as 
Joshua witnessed it,' it must have recalled to him the 
magnificent palm-groves of Egypt, such as may now be 
seen stretching along the shores of the Nile at Memphis. 
Amidst this forest—as is, to a certain extent, the case 
even now—would have been seen, stretching through 
its open spaces, fields of ripe corn; for it was “ the 
time of the barley harvest,” and on the morrow after the 
passover, they ate for the first time “ of the old corn of 
the land and parched corn in the self-same day .” 3 Above 
the topmost trees would be seen the high walls and 
towers of the city, which from that grove derived its 
proud name, “Jericho, the city of palms,” “high, and 
fenced up to heaven”—the walls over which the spies 
had been let down, and which were now to fall before their 
victorious countrymen. Behind the city rose the jagged 
range of the white limestone mountains of Judaea, here pre¬ 
senting one of the few varied and beautiful outlines that 
can be seen amongst the southern hills of Palestine. This 

1 Josh. v. 3. The “hill ” (Gibeah) is Jordan, or the rising ground in the 
probably one of the argillaceous hills forest itself. 2 See Chap. II. p. 143. 
which form the highest terrace of the 3 Josh. v. 11. 


View of 
Jericho at 
the time of 
the capture. 


302 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


Jericho in 
the time of 
the 

Frophets. 


range is the “mountain ” 1 to which the spies had fled, 
whilst their pursuers vainly sought them on the way to 
the Jordan; there they had been concealed, doubtless in 
the caverns with which the side of the mountain is perfo¬ 
rated, the same which in later ages afforded shelter to 
the hermits who there took up their abode, in the belief 
that this was the mountain of the Forty Days’ Fast of the 
Temptation—the “Quarantania,” from which it still derives 
its name. 

The same causes which made Jericho of such importance 
in this first stage of the Hebrew conquest, would also 
render necessary its complete destruction, with the curse on 
its rebuilder. A place of such strength was not to be left 
to be occupied by any hostile force that might take posses¬ 
sion of it. But, again, these same causes occasioned its 
successive restorations, which exceed, probably, those of 
any other city in Palestine, except Jerusalem. First, 
although the actual site of Jericho long lay desolate, yet 
Gilgal, the scene of their first encampment, not two miles 
distant , 2 which enjoyed the same general advantages of 
the shade and the streams of the noble forest, became 
the first regular settlement of Israel . 3 The ground of 
Gilgal was the first that was pronounced “ holy .” 4 On its 
hill, during the long wars in the interior of Palestine, the 
Tabernacle remained, till it found its resting'place in 
Shiloh . 5 And in those sacred groves were celebrated, in 
later times, the solemn assemblies of Samuel and of Saul , 6 
and of David on his return from exile . 7 But Jericho 
itself, in the reign of Ahab , 8 if not before, rose from its 
ruins. A school of prophets 9 gathered round the spot 
almost immediately, and in the glimpses of their history 
we catch the same natural features with which the story 
of the first capture has already made us familiar. Elijah 


1 Josh. ii. 22. 

2 For the relative situation of Je¬ 

richo and Gilgal, see Jos. Ant. V. i, 4 ; 

Bell Jud. IV. viii. 2. 

:1 Ewald (Geschicte 2nd edit. ii. 318) 

well compares this rise of the first 

Israelite settlement out of the rude 

memorials of the passage, with the 


analogous rise of Cairo from Fostat— 
the tent of Arnrou. 

4 Josh. v. 15. 5 Josh, xviii. 1. 

6 1 Sam. vii. 16; x. 8; xi. 14, 15; 
xiii. 7, 9; xv. 33. 

7 2 Sam. xix. 15, 40. 

8 1 Kings xvi. 34. 

9 2 Kings ii. 5. 


THE JORDAN AND THE DEAD SEA. 


and Elislia came to it from Bethel , 1 down the same pass 
of Michmash that in other times was the route of invading 
armies into the interior of Palestine. From Jericho, they 
two “ went on ” to the banks of the Jordan, whilst the 
sons of the prophets stood on the upper terraces, “ afar 
off;” and there, nearly at the same spot where Moses 
had vanished from the eyes of his countrymen, Elijah also 
was withdrawn—as the prophets imagined, carried away, 
to “one of the mountains,” or “one of the ravines ,” 2 which 
line the eastern wilderness, into which they knew he had 
retired. Next, in the same vicinity, occur the several 
scenes of which Elisha is the main figure. The spring 
whose “ waters ” he “ healed,” is probably that which now 
bears his name. He, too, “ went up ” the ascent through 
the pass to Bethel, where, in the forest now destroyed, 
lurked the two she-bears . 3 In his dwelling on the rising 
swell 4 near Gilgal, he received the visit of Naaman, who 
from thence “went down” to the Jordan, murmuring at 
the contrast of its turbid “waters” with the clear “rivers” 
of his native Damascus .” 5 Into the jungle on the banks 
of the river, the sons of the prophets descended to cut 
boughs for their huts, and “ as one was felling a beam ” 
from the branches which overhung the stream, “ the axe- 
head fell into the water.” 6 

The third stage in the history of Jericho is that in which 
its palm-groves and gardens of balsam were given by 
Antony to Cleopatra . 7 They were first farmed for her, 
and then redeemed for himself by Herod the Great, who 
made this one of his princely residences, in which he was 
living at the time of his death. It was this Roman 


1 2 Kings ii. 2, 4. If the reading of 
the Hebrew text, “ they went down,” is 
right, then the Qilgal spoken of in ii. 1, 
cannot be that near Jericho; and 
another Gilgal must be sought in the 
mountains north-west of Bethel; where 
some such place is indicated by the 
ancient Canaanite kingdom of the 
“nations (Goiim) of Qilgal,” between 
Dor and Tirzah (Josh. xii. 23), and 
where a modern village exists, called 
Djiljilia. See also Deut. xi. 30. But 
the LXX read ?i\Qov “ they came.” 

2 2 Kings ii. 16. The LXX in verse 8, 


as if with a slightly different reading, 
renders the words “ on dry ground,” 
by \v ’erf/jap, “ in the wilderness.” 

3 2 Kings ii. 23, 24. 

4 2 Kings v. 24. The word “ Ophel,” 
translated “ tower,” is probably a 
“ swelling,” and in every place, except 
this and Isa. xxxii. 14, where this is 
evidently its signification, is applied to 
Ophel, the fortified hill in Jerusalem 
south of Moriah. See Appendix, s. v. 

5 2 Kings v. 12,14. 

6 2 Kings vi. 2, 5. 

7 Josephus, Ant. XV. iv. 2. 


301 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


Jericlio in 
the time of 
Christ. 


Scene of the 
preaching 
of John. 


Jericho through which Christ passed on His final journey 
to Jerusalem—passed along the road beside which 
stood the sy com ore tree ; 1 went up into the wild dreary 
mountains ; caught from the summit of the pass the first 
glimpse of the line of trees and houses on the summit of 
Olivet; and so went His way through the long ascent, 
the scene of His own parable of the Good Samaritan, till 
He reached the friendly home perched aloft on the 
mountain side—the village of Bethany. 

3. Was this wilderness of His last approach — so we 
naturally ask—the same as that which witnessed His 
earliest trials % Was the reach of the Jordan, which 
Joshua and Elijah crossed, the same as that which was 
consecrated by His first entrance into His public 
ministry % It is difficult to determine. But the indi¬ 
cations of the narrative point to a locality further north 
than the scene which the tradition of the Greek and Latin 
Churches has selected—influenced, doubtless, in part, by 
the convenience of a spot near Jerusalem. “ In the wilder¬ 
ness of Judaea/’ 2 —“in all the country about Jordan,”— 
are the general expressions of the three first Evangelists, 
which would apply to the whole of the southern valley of 
the Jordan. St. John, however, with greater precision, 
adds, “in Beth-abara 3 (the house of passage) beyond 
Jordan'' which seems to confine “ the wilderness ” gene¬ 
rally to the eastern bank, and the special locality to the 
more northern ford, 4 near Succoth, the same by which 


1 Luke xix. 4. See Chapter XIII. 

2 Matt. iii. 1 ; Mark i. 3.; Luke iii. 3. 

3 John i. 23, 29. It is with con¬ 

siderable hesitation that I lay any 
stress on the name “Bethabara.” All 
the oldest MSS. (A, B, C, E, F, G, K, 
L, M, S, V, X, A) and nearly all the 
versions, read not “Bethabara” but 
“Bethanyand Origen, in his com¬ 
mentary on the passage, states that in 
his time this reading prevailed in 
“ almost all the MSS ” (crx^ov iraura ra 
'avTlypacpa). But considering the great 
improbability of the alteration of the 
familiar word “ Bethany ” into the com¬ 
paratively unknown “ Bethabara ”— 
considering also that in the locality 
Origen still found the name “ Betha¬ 


bara ”—considering, finally, that if the 
Evangelist had meant to distinguish it 
from the Judaean Bethany, he would 
have written BrjOavia rrj irdpav rov I op- 
Savou, or, at any rate, placed B -pGavia 
in close connection with irepav tov lop- 
Sai >ov —it seems most likely that Origen 
was right in altering the text, and 
being, as he says, “ persuaded that we 
ought to read Bethabara.” The northern 
situation of Bethabara is implied in 
Epiphanius (Haer. 535). Those who read 
Btj davla, make it “the house of boats,” 
in allusion to the ferry-boat. Comp, in 
that case, 2 Sam. xix. 18. 

4 Van de Velde (ii. 471) makes this 
to be itself Bethabara. 


THE JORDAN AND THE DEAD SEA. 


305 


Jacob had crossed from Mahanaim, by which the Midianites 
endeavoured to escape in their flight from Gideon, and 
where Jephthah slew the Ephraimites. 1 That it was this 
more northern spot is also confirmed by the mention of 
the time that it took for the return from the Jordan to 
Nazareth, apparently not more than a day, which might 
be possible from Succoth, but would certainly not be 
possible from Jericho. And on a subsequent occasion 
John is described as baptising in ^Enon (“the springs”), 
“ near to Salim,” 2 which must, probably, be the same 
“ Salem 3 ” as that near Shechem, close to the passage 
of the Jordan near Succoth, and far away from that near 
J ericho. 

If this be so, the scenery of the exact spot of John’s 
baptism, though visited by two or three travellers, has 
never been described. This is, perhaps, of less importance, 
because the images, and even associations, of the whole 
valley are so similar, that what applies to one spot must, 
more or less, apply to all. The “ wilderness ” of the 
desert-plain, whether on the western or eastern side, is 
the most marked in the whole country, and never has been 
inhabited, except for the purposes of ascetic seclusion, as 
by the Essenes, and the hermits of later times. Wide 
as was the moral and spiritual difference between the 
two great Prophets of the Jordan wilderness, and the 
wild ascetics of later times, yet it is for this very reason 
important to bear in mind the outward likeness which 
sets off this inward contrast. Travellers know well the 
startling appearance of the savage figures, wdio, whether 
as Bedouins or Dervishes, still haunt the solitary places 
of the East, with “a cloak,”—the usual striped Bedouin 
blanket — “ woven of camel’s hair, thrown over the 
shoulders, and tied in front on the breast; naked, except 
at the waist, round which is a girdle of skin ; the hair 
flowing loose about the head.” 4 This was precisely the 
description of Elijah—whose last appearance had been 

1 Gen. xxxih 22 ; Jud. vii. 24; xii. near W4dy Chusech. (Van de Velde, 

5, 6. i. 346.) 

2 John, iii. 23. Compare the de- 3 See Chap. V.; note on Gerizim. 

scription of the numerous springs 4 See Light’s description of two 

near the tomb of Sheyhk Salem, Egyptian Dervishes in Syria (p. 135). 

x 


306 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


Scene of the 
Temp¬ 
tation. 


Baptism in 
the Jordan. 


on this very wilderness, before he finally vanished from 
the eyes of his disciple. This, too, was the aspect of his 
great representative, when he came, in the same place, 
dwelling, like the sons of the prophets, in a leafy covert 
woven of the branches of the Jordan-forest, preaching, 
in “ raiment of camel’s hair,” with a “ leathern girdle 
round his loins,” eating the “ locusts and wild honey ” of the 
desert—the “ wild honey ” or “ manna,” which drops from 
the tamarisks of the desert-region, and ceases on reaching 
the cultivated districts of Jericho and Judsea. To the 
same wilderness, probably that on the eastern side, Jesus 
is described as “ led up ” 1 by the Spirit—up into the 
desert-hills whence Moses had seen the view of all the 
“ kingdoms ” of Palestine — “ with the wild beasts ” 2 
which lurked in the bed of the Jordan, or in the 
caves of the hills—“ where John was baptising, beyond 
Jordan ” 

If from the general scene we turn to the special 
locality of the river banks, the reason of John’s selection 
is at once explained. He came “ baptising,” that is, 
signifying to those who came to him, as he plunged them 
under the rapid torrent, the forgiveness and forsaking 
of their former sins. It was in itself no new ceremony. 
Ablutions, in the East, have always been more or less a 
part of religious worship—easily performed, and always 
welcome. Every synagogue, if possible, was by the side 
of a stream or spring ; every mosque, still, requires a foun¬ 
tain or basin for lustrations in its court. But John needed 
more than this. He taught, not under roof or shelter of 
sacred buildings, but far from the natural haunts of men. 
He proclaimed repentance, not only to handfuls of men here 
and there, but to the whole nation. Ho common spring 
or tank would meet the necessities of the multitudes “ who, 
from Jerusalem and all Judsea, and all the region round 
about Jordan, came to him confessing their sins.” 3 The 
Jordan, by the very peculiarity of its position, which, 
as before observed, renders its functions so unlike those of 
other Eastern streams, now seemed to have met with its 


1 Matt, iv 1. 


2 Mark i. 13. 


3 Matt. iii. 5. 



, THE JORDAN AND THE DEAD SEA. 


307 


fit purpose. 1 It was the one river of Palestine—sacred in 
its recollections—abundant in its waters ; and yet, at the 
same time, the river, not of cities, but of the wilderness— 
the scene of the preaching of those who dwelt not in king's 
palaces, nor wore soft clothing. On the banks of the 
rushing stream the multitudes gathered—the priests and 
scribes from Jerusalem, down the pass of Adummim ; the 
publicans from Jericho on the south, and the Lake of 
Gennesareth on the north ; the soldiers on their way from 
Damascus to Petra, through the Ghor, in the war with 
the Arab chief Hareth ; the peasants from Galilee, with 
One from. Nazareth, through the opening of the plain of 
Esdraelon. The tall “ reeds ” or canes in the jungle 
waved, “ shaken 2 by the wind ; ” the pebbles of the bare 
clay hills lay around, to which the Baptist pointed as 
capable of being transformed into “ the children 3 of 
Abraham ; ” at their feet rushed the refreshing stream of 
the never-failing river. There began that sacred rite, 
which has since spread throughout the world, through the 
vast baptistries of the southern and Oriental churches, 
gradually dwindling to the little fonts of the north and 
west; the plunges beneath the water diminishing to the 
few drops which, by a wise exercise of Christian freedom, 
are now in most churches the sole representative of the 
full stream of the Descending River. 

The interest, which thus attaches to the Jordan, is 
one which it possesses to an extent probably enjoyed 
by no other sacred locality in the Holy Land. In the 
mosaics of the earliest churches at Rome and Ravenna, 
before Christian and Pagan Art were yet divided, the 
Jordan appears as a river-god, pouring his streams out 
of his urn. The first Christian Emperor had always 
hoped to receive his long-deferred baptism in the 
Jordan, up to the moment when the hand of death 


1 It may be observed that the only 
other extensive baptisms recorded out¬ 
side of Jerusalem, are at Salim (John 
iii. 23), where there was “ much water,” 
and at Samaria (Acts viii. 12), whose 
abundant streams have been described 
elsewhere. See Chapter V. 


2 “ What went ye out into the wil¬ 
derness to see ? a reed shaken with the 
wind?” Matt. xi. 7. See p. 291. 

3 “ God is able of these stones to raise 
up children unto Abraham.” Matt, 
iii. 9. 

x 2 






308 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


Bathing of 
the 

pilgrims. 


struck him at Nicomedia. The name of the river has, 
in Spain and Italy, by a natural association, been turned 
into a common Christian name for children at the hour 
of the baptism which served to connect them with 
it. Protestants, as well as Greeks and Latins, have 
delighted to carry off its waters for the same sacred 
purpose, to the remotest regions of the West. Of all the 
practices—superstitious, if we choose so to call them—of 
the Oriental Churches in Palestine, none is more innocent 
or natural than the ceremony repeated year by year at 
the Greek Easter—the bathing of the pilgrims in the 
Jordan. It has often been witnessed by European 
travellers. I venture to describe it from my own recol¬ 
lections, for the sake both of the general illustration 
which it furnishes of the present forms of Oriental 
Christianity, and also as presenting the nearest likeness 
that can now be seen in the same general scenery to 
the multitudinous baptisms of John. Once a year—on 
the Monday in Passion Week—the desolation of the Plain 
of Jericho is broken by the descent from the Judaean 
hills of five, six, or eight thousand pilgrims, who are 
now, from all parts of the old Byzantine Empire, gathered 
within the walls of Jerusalem. The Turkish governor 
is with them, an escort of Turkish soldiers accompanies 
them, to protect them down the desert-hills, against the 
robbers who, from the days of the Good Samaritan 
downwards, have infested the solitary pass. On a 
bare space beside the tangled thickets of the modern 
Jericho,—distinguished by the square tower, now the 
castle of its chief, and called by pilgrims the ‘House of 
Zacchseus,’—the vast encampment is spread out, recalling 
the image of the tents which Israel here first pitched by 
Gilgal. Two hours before dawn, the rude Eastern kettle¬ 
drum rouses the sleeping multitude. It is to move 
onwards to the Jordan, so as to accomplish the object 
before the great heat of the lower valley becomes intoler¬ 
able. Over the intervening Desert, the wide crowd advances 
in almost perfect silence. Above is the bright Paschal 
Moon—before them moves a bright flare of torches—on 
each side huge watchfires break the darkness of the night, 


THE JORDAN AND THE DEAD SEA. 


309 


and act as beacons for the successive descents of the road. 
The sun breaks over the eastern hills as the head of the 
cavalcade reaches the brink of the Jordan. Then it is, 
for the first time, that the European traveller sees the 
Sacred River, rushing through its thicket of tamarisk, 
willow, and agnus-castus, with rapid eddies, and of a 
turbid yellow colour, like the Tiber at Rome, and about 
as broad—sixty or eighty feet. 1 The chief features 
of the scene are the white cliffs and green thickets on 
each bank, though at this spot they break away, on 
the western side, so as to leave an open space for the 
descent of the pilgrims. Beautiful as the scene is, it 
is impossible not to feel a momentary disappointment 
at the conviction, produced by the first glance, that it 
cannot be the spot either of the passage of Joshua, or 
of the baptism of John. The high eastern banks (not to 
mention the other considerations named before) preclude 
both events. But in a few moments the great body 
of the pilgrims, now distinctly visible in the breaking day, 
appear on the ridge of the last terrace. None, or hardly 
any, are on foot. Horse, mule, ass, and camel, in pro¬ 
miscuous confusion, bearing whole families on their backs 
—a father, mother, and three children, perhaps, on a 
single camel—occupy the vacant spaces between and 
above the jungle in all directions. 

If the traveller expects a wild burst of enthusiasm, such 
as that of the Greeks when they caught the first glimpse 
of the sea, or the German armies at the sight of the Rhine, 
he will be disappointed. Nothing is more remarkable in the 
whole pilgrimage to the Jordan, from first to last, than the 
absence of any such displays. Nowhere is more clearly 
seen that deliberative business-like aspect of their devotion, 
so well described in Eothen, unrelieved by any expression 
of emotion, unless, perhaps, a slight tinge of merriment. 
They dismount, and set to work to perform their bathe; 2 
most on the open space, some further up amongst the 


1 So Newbold, Journal R. As. Soc., The landing-place was once cased with 

xv. 20. marble, and a large cross was planted 

2 The slight variations in earlier in the middle of the stream, 
times are given in Ritter, vol. ii. p. 536. 





310 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


thickets ; some plunging in naked—most, however, with 
white dresses, which they bring with them, and which, 
having been so used, are kept for their winding-sheets. 
Most of the bathers keep within the shelter of the bank, 
where the water is about four feet in depth, though with 
a bottom of very deep mud. The Coptic pilgrims are 
curiously distinguished from the rest by the boldness with 
which they dart into the main current, striking the water 
after their fashion alternately with their two arms, and 
playing with the eddies, which hurry them down and 
across, as if they were in the cataracts of their own Nile ; 
crashing through the thick boughs of the jungle which, 
on the eastern bank of the stream, intercepts their pro¬ 
gress, and then recrossing the river higher up, where they 
can wade, assisted by long poles which they have cut 
from the opposite thickets. It is remarkable, consider¬ 
ing the mixed assemblage of men and women, in such 
a scene, that there is so little appearance of levity or 
indecorum. A primitive domestic character pervades in 
a singular form the whole transaction. The families 
which have come on their single mule or camel, now 
bathe together, with the utmost gravity ; the father 
receiving from the mother the infant, which has been 
brought to receive the one immersion which will suffice 
for the rest of its life, and thus, by a curious economy of 
resources, save it from the expense and danger of a future 
pilgrimage in after-years. In about two hours the shores 
are cleared; with the same quiet they remount their 
camels and horses ; and before the noonday heat has set in, 
are again encamped on the upper plain of Jericho. . . . 
Once more they may be seen. At the dead of night, the 
drum again wakes them for their homeward march. The 
torches again go before; behind follows the vast multi¬ 
tude, mounted, passing in profound silence over that silent 
plain—so silent that, but for the tinkling of the drum, 
its departure would hardly be perceptible. The troops 
stay on the ground to the end, to guard the rear, and 
when the last roll of the drum announces that the last 
soldier is gone, the whole plain returns again to its perfect 
solitude. 


CHAPTER VIII 


PERA3A, OR THE TRANSJORDANIC TRIBES. 

Psalm xlii. 6. “ My soul is cast down within me: therefore will I 

remember thee from the land of Jordan, and of the Hermonites, 
from the ‘ mountain ’ Mizar.” 





I. General character of the scenery. II. First view of the Holy Land. 
III. Frontier land. IV. Isolation. V. Pastoral character of the 
country and its inhabitants. YI. Land of exile. Last view of the 
Holy Land. 


PE ILEA, AND THE TRANS-JORDAN IC 
TRIBES. 


Who that has ever travelled in Palestine has not longed 
to cross the Jordan-valley to those mysterious hills which 
close every eastward view with their long horizontal out¬ 
line, their overshadowing height, their deep purple shade \ 
It is this which probably constitutes the most novel fea¬ 
ture of the Holy Land to any one who first sees it with his 
own eyes. Partly from the slight historical interest which 
attaches to Eastern compared with Western Palestine, 
partly from the few visits paid to those insecure regions, 
it has usually happened that general descriptions of 
the country almost omit to notice the one elevating 
and solemn background of all that is poor and mean in 
the scenery of Palestine, properly so called. To those 
who, like myself, have been unable to cross the .Jordan 
and explore those unknown heights, this distant view is 
the sole impression left by the mountain range of Ammon 
and Moab. But it is an impression which may assist 
them in forming some notion of the interior of the region, 
as described by those who have had better fortune and 
more abundant leisure. 1 


1 I have to express my thanks to the 
Rev. G. Horsley Palmer, for most of 
the facts of this chapter. No other 
traveller, to my knowledge, has ex¬ 
plored this district so thoroughly— 
certainly none whom I have consulted 
has described it so vividly and intel¬ 
ligibly. The northern portion of 


the trans-Jordanic territory—including 
Gaulonitis, the Haur&n, and Tracho- 
nitis,—I have left unnoticed, partly 
because it was not needed for the 
elucidation of the history, partly be¬ 
cause it will be for the first time fully 
described by Mr. Porter, in his forth¬ 
coming work on Damascus. 




314 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


General 
character 
of the 
scenery. 


The first 
view of the 
Holy Land 
from the 
east. 


I. The mountains rise from the valley of the Jordan to 
the height, it is believed, of two or three thousand feet, 
and this gives them, when seen from the western side, the 
appearance of a much greater actual elevation than they 
really possess ; as though they rose high above the moun¬ 
tains of Judaea on which the spectator stands. As they 
are approached from the Ghor, the horizontal outline which 
they always wear when seen from a distance is broken ; 
and it is described, that when their summits are attained, a 
wholly new scene bursts upon the view ; unlike anything 
which could be expected from below—unlike anything in 
Western Palestine. A wide table-land appears tossed 
about in wild confusion of undulating downs, clothed with 
rich grass throughout, and, in the northern parts, 1 with 
magnificent forests of sycomore, beech, terebinth, ilex, 
and enormous figtrees. These downs are broken by three 
deep defiles, through which the three rivers of the Jarmuk, 
the Jabbok, and the Arnon, fall into the Jordan. On the 
east, they melt away into the vast red plain which, by a 
gradual descent, joins the level of the plain of the Hauran, 
and of the Assyrian desert. This is the general picture 
given of the trans-Jordanic territory. 

II. What is the history of which this is the theatre ? 
First, its mere outline, even as seen from the western side 
of the Jordan, suggests the fact that those heights, every¬ 
where visible in central Palestine, must have commanded 
the first view of the Promised Land in all approaches 
from the east. It is said by those who have visited 
those parts, that one remarkable effect produced, is the 
changed aspect of the hills of Judah and Ephraim. Their 
monotonous character is lost, and the range when seen 
as a whole is in the highest degree diversified and im¬ 
pressive. And the wide openings in the western hills, as 
they ascend from the Jordan-valley, give such extensive 
glimpses into the heart of the country, that not merely 
the general range, but particular localities can be dis¬ 
cerned with ease. From a point above the Dead Sea, 


1 The upper range of Gilead, i. e. lower, valonidi oak—the ilex through- 
south of the Jabbok, is oak and arbutus out (Lord Lindsay, ii. 122). Ammon is 
— the central, arbutus and fir—the outside the forest range. (Ibid. p. 121.) 


PERJJA, AND THE TRANS-JORDANIC TRIBES. 


315 


Bethlehem, 1 and Jerusalem can both be seen in the same 
prospect. From the Castle of Rubad, north of the Jabbok, 
are distinctly visible Lebanon, the Sea of Galilee, Esdraelon 
in its full extent, Carmel, the Mediterranean, and the whole 
range of Judah and Ephraim. “ It is the finest view,” 
to use the words of the traveller from whom most of the 
information contained in this chapter is derived, “that 
I ever saw in any part of the world.” This view—so 
multiplied and so beautiful—must have been the very 
prospect which presented itself to the eyes, first of Abra¬ 
ham, and then of Jacob, as they descended from these 
summits on their way from Mesopotamia ; it must have 
been substantially the same as that which was unfolded 
before the eyes of Balaam and Moses, when, as we have 
seen, 2 the Sacred Narrative draws out these several features 
in the utmost detail. It is in all probability the view which 
furnished the framework of the vision of “ all the kingdoms 
of the world ” which was revealed in a moment of time 
to Him who was driven up from the valley below to 
these mountains at the opening of His public ministry. 
Difficult as it may be to decide the precise spot intended 
by the name of Pisgah, the accounts given of these 
trans-Jordanic heights show that this matters little; the 
whole range is one vast Pisgah, with the deep shades of 
the Jordan-valley beneath, the Land of Promise beyond ; 
whilst close around lies the beautiful country, so long the 
halting-place though not the permanent home of Israel 
after his weary passage through the Arabian Desert. 

III. For, again, it was the frontier-land of Palestine, 
and therefore, through all its history, the first conquered, 
the first lost, by the hosts of Israel. The great table¬ 
lands, the “cultivated fields” of Moab and Ammon, 
as distinct from the “ wilderness ” into which these lands 
die on the east, and the “ desert-plains ” of Moab in 
the Jordan-valley at the foot of the mountains,—were 
the rich prize first wrested from Moab and Ammon 3 by 
the Amorite kings, and from them by the Israelites under 
Moses ; Ammon and Moab themselves remaining uninjured 

1 Compare the viewfrom Heshbon, as 2 See Chapter VII. pp. 293—265. 
described in Schwarze (in voce Heshbon). 3 Numb. xxi. 26—29. 


Frontier - 
land. 


316 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


in the border of the wilderness which they still occupied. 
This first stage of the conquest of Canaan is too briefly 
described to receive any detailed elucidation from the 
localities, even if they were better known than they are. 
All that we can discern is the approach of Israel through 
the eastern Desert skirting the confines of Moab and 
Ammon; and at last meeting the Amorite king “ in the 
wilderness ” at Jahaz. 1 There was fought the first pitched 
battle between Israel and Canaan, and the victory was 
followed by the subjugation of the whole kingdom from 
the torrent of the Arnon on the south, to the torrent 
of the Jabbok on the north. Eastward the unconquered 
tribe of Ammon still compressed their limits—but the 
whole of the rich pasture was theirs, up to the point where 
it melts away into the steppes of the wilderness. Within 
the range of this ancient kingdom of Sihon were planted 
the tribes of Reuben and Gad. Another step had to be 
taken before a fitting settlement could be procured for the 
powerful fragment of Manasseh, which had joined its 
fortunes to these two tribes. Another battle, also on 
the junction of the rich lands with the wilderness, was 
fought at Edrei; and the high mountain-tract of Gilead 
and Bashan, from the deep ravine of the Jabbok up to 
the base of Hermon, was added to the territory. 2 

As it was thus first occupied by the Israelites, so it 
subsequently became the border-land between Palestine 
and the nations of eastern Asia. From its midway posi¬ 
tion it necessarily bore the brunt of all the incursions 
of the Syrians of Damascus, when Ramoth-Gilead became 
the scene of so many sieges and battles, as the fortress 
for which both kingdoms contended; and for the same 
reason it was the first to resist and the first to fall 
before the arms of the Assyrian Tiglath-Pileser. In this 
respect the range of Gilead remained faithful to the 
description given by the two Patriarchs who of old 
parted on its summit; as the boundary line between 
the tribes of Canaan and those of Mesopotamia. “ This 
heap is a witness between me and thee this day. . . . 


1 Numb. xxi. 23; Jud. xi. 20. 


2 Deut. iii. 1. 


PERJ3A, AND THE TRANS-J0RDANIC TRIBES. 


317 


The God of Abraham, and the God of Nalior judge 
betwixt us.” 1 

IV. From this aspect of the country, we naturally pass 
to its isolation from the rest of Palestine. However much 
connected by vicinity and race with their western kinsmen, 
the dwellers in eastern Palestine have always been distinct. 
It has been to the main body of the people, what Scotland 
or Ireland has been to the chief course of English history. 
Inhabited from the earliest times by races of a stock, 
separate and even hostile, the table-lands east of the 
Jordan were never occupied by the nations on the west, 
except through acts of aggression and conquest. The 
Amorite chiefs, Og and Sihon, established themselves 
on the acclivities of these heights, but only to be them¬ 
selves dislodged in turn by the Israelites ; the Amorite 
kings of Palestine Proper not striking a blow in defence of 
their trans-Jordanic brethren. And the Israelite tribes 
who settled there hardly ever exercised any influence over 
their countrymen on the western banks, were carried 
into captivity long before them, and were succeeded by 
settlers not of Jewish, but of Gentile origin; and the 
whole country is. as has been already observed, a com¬ 
paratively unknown region to the present inhabitants of 
Palestine. This separation is in part owing to the great 
natural rent which the Jordan has created between the 
two districts ; but it is also owing to some peculiarities of 
the country itself. 2 

Y. It was the forest-land, the pasture-land of Palestine. 
The smooth downs received a special name, 3 expressive of 
their contrast with the rough and rocky soil of the west. 
The “ oaks ” of Bashan, which still fill the traveller with 
admiration, were to the prophets and psalmists of Israel 
the chief glory of the vegetation of their common country. 
The vast herds of wild cattle, now seemingly extinct, 


1 Gen. xxxi. 48, 53. Gilead is “ the 
heap of witness.” 

2 The complete isolation of the pre¬ 
sent inhabitants of the trans-Jordanic 

Palestine, may be estimated by the 
notions of geography communicated 
to Buckingham by the people of Salt. 


They maintained that there were only 
four seas in the world, of which two 
were the sea of Galilee and the Dead Sea. 
(Buckingham, c. 2). 

3 Mishor. See Chapter VI. and Ap¬ 
pendix. 


Isolation. 


Pastoral 
character of 
the country. 



318 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


but which then wandered through those woods,—as those 
of Scotland through its ancient forests,—were, in like 
manner, at once the terror and pride of the Israelite,— 
“ the fat bulls of Basham” Flocks, too, there were of every 
kind—“ rams and lambs, and goats, and bullocks, all 
of them fatlings of Bashan.” 1 

It is striking to remember, that with this land in 
their possession—a land of which travellers say, l^hat in 
beauty and fertility it as far surpasses western Palestine as 
Devonshire surpasses Cornwall—the Israelites nevertheless 
pressed forwards, through the Jordan-valley, up the precipi¬ 
tous ravines of Jericho and Ai, and settled in the rugged 
mountains of Judah and Ephraim, never to return to those 
beautiful regions which had been their first home in the 
Promised Land. “ The Lord had made them ride on the high 
places of the earth, that they might eat the increase of the 
fields; and he made them to suck honey out of the 4 cliff’ and 
oil out of the flinty rock; butter of kine, and milk of sheep, 
with fat of lambs, and rams of the breed of Bashan, and 
goats, with the fat of kidneys of wheat, and .... the pure 
blood of the grape.” 2 * So, we are told, spoke their Prophet- 
leader, whilst they were still in enjoyment of this rich 
country. Yet forwards they went. It was the same 
high calling—whether we name it impulse, destiny, or 
Providence—which had already drawn Abraham from 
Mesopotamia, and Moses from the Court of Memphis. They 
knew not what was before them, they knew not what 
depended on their crossing the Jordan—on their becoming 
a settled and agricultural, instead of a nomadic, people— 
on their reaching to the shores of the sea, and from those 
shores receiving the influences of the Western world, and 
sending forth to that Western world their influences in 
return. They knew not; but we know ; and the more we 


1 Ezek. xxxix. 18. 

2 Deut. xxxii. 13, 14. All these ex¬ 
pressions seem to have peculiar refer¬ 
ence to their home in the trans-Jordanic 

territory ; that being the whole of 
Palestine that they had seen at the 
time when Moses is represented as 

uttering these words. “ The high 
places”—and “the fields,” are specially 


applicable to the table-lands of Gilead ; 
and still more, the allusions to the herds 
and flocks. In like manner is not Ps. 
cxxxvi. peculiarly adapted to the trans- 
Jordanic tribes? It is difficult else to 
account for the stress laid on the con¬ 
quest of Sihon and Og, to the entire 
exclusion of the conquest of Canaan. 


PERJEA, AND THE TRANS-JORDANIC TRIBES. 


319 


hear of the beauty of the trans-Jordanic territory, the 
greater is the wonder,—the greater, we may almost say, 
should be our thankfulness, — that they exchanged it 
for Palestine itself, inferior, as it might naturally have 
seemed to them, in every point, except for the high 
purposes to which they were called, and for which* their 
permanent settlement on the eastern side of the Jordan 
would, humanly speaking, have wholly unfitted them. 
What a change would thus have been made in their 
destiny is best seen by following up the history of the 
tribes which did so separate themselves from their brethren. 

The great excellence of the eastern table-land was, as 
has been said, in pasture and in forest,—“a place for 
cattle .” 1 In the encampment of Israel two tribes, 
Reuben and Gad, were pre-eminently pastoral. They 
had “ a very great multitude of cattle.” For this they 
desired the land, and for this it was given to them, “ that 
they might build cities for their little ones, and folds 
for their sheep ” 2 In no other case is the relation be¬ 
tween the territory and its occupiers so expressly laid 
down, and such it continued to be to the end. From first 
to last, they alone of the tribes never emerged from the 
state of their Patriarchal ancestors. When Joshua bade 
them return to their possessions, it was- not to their 
“ houses,” but to their “ tents.” When, on their return, they 
reached the Jordan—the boundary between themselves and 
their more settled brethren,—they erected, like the true 
Children of the Desert, the huge stone of division to mark 
the frontier, which their more civilised kinsmen mistook 
for an altar ; 3 just as Jacob and Laban had in earlier times 
raised a similar cairn on the heights of Gilead ; just as the 
traveller now sees the “ Hadjar Alouin,”—the pile of stones 
that denotes the boundary of the Alouin and of the Towara 
tribes at the head of the Gulf of Akaba. Of their subse¬ 
quent history this is still the prevailing feature. Reuben 
is the most purely nomadic, and, therefore, the most 

1 It is still the favourite tract of the 2 Numbers xxxii. 1, 4, 16, 24, 26, 
Bedouin shepherds. “ Thou canst not,” 36. 
they say, “find a country like the 3 Josh. xxii. 4—10. 

Balka.” Buckingham, i. 369. 


Pastoral 
and no¬ 
madic cha¬ 
racter of 
the tribes 
east of the 
Jordan. 


Reuben. 




320 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


Gad. 


Manasseh. 


transitory. He is to the eastern tribes what Simeon is to 
the western. “ Unstable as water/’ he vanishes away into 
a mere Arabian tribe ; “ his men are 1 few/’—it is all that 
he can do “to live and not die.” We hear of nothing 
beyond the multiplication of “ their cattle in the land of 
Gilead/' their “ wars with the Bedouin " sons of Hagar/ ” 
their spoils of “ camels fifty thousand, and of sheep two 
hundred and fifty thousand, and of asses two thousand.” 2 
In the great struggles of the nation he never took part. 
The complaint against him in the Song of Deborah is the 
summary of his whole history. “ By the ‘ streams ’ of 
Reuben,”—that is, by the fresh streams which descend 
from the eastern hills into the Jordan and the Dead Sea, 
on whose banks the Bedouin chiefs then, as now, met to 
debate, 3 —“ in the ‘ streams ’ of Reuben great were the 
" decrees.’ Why dwellest thou among the sheep ‘ troughs ’ 
to hear the "pipings ’ of the flocks ?- 4 By the " streams ’ of 
Reuben great were the searchings of heart.” Gad Has a 
more distinctive character, something of the lion-like aspect 
of Judah. In the forest-region south of the Jabbok, “ he 
dwelt 5 as a lion.” Out of his tribe came the eleven 
valiant chiefs who crossed the fords of the Jordan in flood¬ 
time to join the outlawed David, “ whose faces were like 
the faces of lions, and were as swift as the ‘ gazelles ’ 
upon the mountains .” 6 Those heroes were but the 
Bedouins of their time. The very name of Gad expressed 
the wild aspect which he presented to the wild tribes of 
the east. “ Gad is a " troop of plunderers / a troop of 
plunderers shall "plunder’ him, but he "shall plunder’ at the 
last .” 7 What broke up the great tribe of Manasseh into 
two parts, and left one to follow the fortunes of its kindred 
house of Ephraim in the settled life of the western hills, 
and the other to wander over the pastures and forests of 
Gilead and Bashan, is not expressly said. But there, also, 
the same character prevails. The sixty, or the thirty, towns 


1 Deut. xxxiii. 6.—The English ver¬ 
sion has added “ not ” from the LXX. 

2 1 Chr. v. 9, 10, 20, 21. 

3 Herder (Heb. Poes. p. 192). Comp. 
Numb. xxi. 17 ; Ex. xv. 25. 

4 Jud. v. 15,16. Ewald (Geschichte, 

2nd edit. iii. 88), renders it “ the piping 


of the flocks,” in allusion to the shep¬ 
herd-songs, of which David’s is the 
earliest known specimen. 

5 Deut. xxxiii. 20. 

6 1 Chr. xii. 8, 15. 

7 Gen. xlix. 19 ; comp. xxx. 11. 


PERiEA, AND THE TRANS-JORDANIC TRIBES. 


321 


of Jair, the ancient chief of the tribe of Manasseh, were not 
called cities, but Bedouin ‘ villages of tents/ 1 “ Gilead/' in 
the Song of Deborah, is said “to dwell beyond the Jordan in 
‘ tents.' " 2 Such as was the general character of the tribe, 
were also its individual heroes who, at rare intervals, acquired 
a national importance. How much more intelligible does 
Jephthah become, when we remember that he was raised up, 
not from the regular settlements of Judah and Ephraim, 
but from the half-civilised region of the eastern tribes ; in 
the wildness of his freebooting life, in the rashness and 
ignorance of his vow, in the savage vengeance which he 
exacted from the insolence of Ephraim,—a Bedouin chief 
rather than an Israelitish judge. And, yet more, how 
lively an image do we form of the grandest and the most 
romantic character that Israel ever produced—Elijah the 
Tishbite—when we recollect that he, too, was born 
amongst the forests of Gilead, and found his first refuge 
in the clefts of the Cherith ; 3 that the shaggy hair, 
the rough camel's hair mantle girt by the leathern girdle 
round his naked body; the fleetness of foot, with which, 
“ when the hand of the Lord was upon him," he outran 
the chariot of Ahab ; the sudden appearances and dis¬ 
appearances, which baffled all the zeal of his enemies and 
his friends to discover him ; the long wanderings into the 
Desert of southern Arabia to “Horeb, the Mount of God 
all are special characteristics of the Bedouin life, which 
were dignified but not destroyed by his high prophetic mis¬ 
sion. And the fact that this special mission was entrusted, 
not to a dweller in royal city or Prophetic school, but to 
one who, in manner of life and in outward aspect, and to 
a great extent by his place of birth, was a genuine son 
of the Desert, is in remarkable accordance with the 
dispensations of Providence both in earlier and later 
times. Elijah the Gileadite, in his witness for the unity 
of God against the idolatries of Phoenicia, was the fitting 
successor of those who had been the heralds of the same 


1 Havotli-Jair. See Appendix. Mangles at “ Gilead Gilhood,” near Salt. 

2 Judges v. 17. (Irby and Mangles, p. 300). For the 

3 1 Kin.xvii. 1, 3. The birth-place of position of the Cherith, see Chap. VII. 
Elijah was pointed out to Irby and 

Y 


322 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


The land of 
exile. 


truth before ; the wandering Chief from Ur of the Chaldees, 
the Arabian Shepherd in Mount Sinai. 

YI. There is one final and touching interest with which 
the “land beyond the Jordan” is invested, by virtue of its 
position, as a portion, and yet not a portion, of the land of 
Israel. It was emphatically the land of exile,—the refuge 
of exiles. One place there was in its beautiful uplands, 
consecrated by the presence of God in primeval 
times. “ Mahanaim,” marked the spot where Jacob had 
divided his host into “ Two Hosts,” and seen the “ Two 
Hosts ” of the angelic vision. To this scene of the great 
crisis in their ancestor’s life the thoughts of his descend¬ 
ants returned in after-years, whenever foreign conquest 
or civil discord drove them from their native hills on the 
west of the Jordan. The first instance was when Abner 
rallied the Israelites round the unfortunate Ishbosheth, 
after the rout of Gilboa, and “ brought him over ” the 
Jordan “ to Mahanaim .” 1 2 The second was when David 
fled from Absalom. Then, for the only time since the 
conquest, the whole interest of Israelite history is trans¬ 
ferred to the trans-Jordanic territory. The scenes of that 
mournful period are but imperfectly brought before us ; 
but so far as they are, they agree with all that we know 
of the localities. David crossed the Jordan by the fords 
of Jericho, and ascended the eastern heights till he came 
to Mahanaim. The people that came with him spread 
themselves out beyond the cultivated table-lands into the 
“ wilderness ” of the steppes of Hauran. Whilst they were 
there, “ hungry and weary and thirsty,” the chiefs of the 
surrounding tribes, Shobi of Ammon, and Machir and 
Barzillai of Manasseh, brought the produce which formed 
the pride of their rich lands and pastures—“ wheat and 
barley, and flour, and parched corn, and beans, and lentiles, 
and parched pulse, and honey , and butter , and sheep, and 
cheese of kine .” 2 The forest of Ephraim, in which the 
decisive battle was fought, as the narrative implies , 3 was 


1 2 Sam ii. 8. 

2 2 Sam. xvii. 27, 28, 29. 

3 It is said in 2 Sam. xvii. 24, 26, that 
“Absalom and all the men of Israel 


passed over Jordan . . . and pitched 
in the land of Gilead .” The name of 
“the forest of Ephraim" may be ex¬ 
plained from the connection of blood 


PERAEA, AND THE TRANS-JORDANIC TRIBES. 


323 


also on the east of the Jordan, and if so, the thick woods 
of oak and terebinth curiously illustrate the defeat and 
death of Absalom, “ the forest devouring more people than 
the sword/' and the prince himself caught in “the thick 
boughs of ‘ the 5 great 4 terebinth.'" 1 

The refuge that the trans-Jordanic hills afforded to 
David, they afforded also to David's greater Son. 
“ Persea,"— c the land beyond' (the Jordan),—as it was 
called in the Greek nomenclature of its Roman conquerors, 
still occupied the same relation, secluded and retired from 
the busy world which filled the neighbourhood of Jeru¬ 
salem and of the Sea of Galilee. Thither, as we have 
seen, our Lord probably retired after His baptism; thither, 
also, in the interval of danger which immediately preceded 
the end of His earthly course . 2 

To this same characteristic is to be traced its last 
historical significance. Somewhere on the slopes of Gilead, 
near the scene of Jacob's first view of the land of his 
descendants and of the capital of the exiled David, was 
Pella, so called by the Macedonian Greeks from the 
springing fountain , 3 which likened it to the birth¬ 
place of their own Alexander. This was the city 
known so well in Christian history as the refuge of 
the little band which here took shelter when the 
armies of Titus gathered round Jerusalem . 4 The view 
from it is thus described :—“ In the fore-ground at my 
feet was the Jordan, flowing through its wood of tere¬ 
binths. On the other side rose gently the plain of 
Beisan, surmounted by the high eminence of that name. 
In the distance were the mountains of Gilboa .... 


with the trans-Jordanic Manasseh. It is 
more difficult to account for the state¬ 
ment that Ahimaaz in hastening from 
the scene of the battle to announce the 
news to David at Mahanaim, ran by the 
way of ‘ the Ciccar ’ (xviii. 23), a word 
only used elsewhere in connection with 
the valley of the Jordan. It is possible, 
however, that there may have been a 
place, or region, so called on the table¬ 
lands, as the LXX seem to suppose, here 
alone not translating it. Or Mahanaim 
may have been so situated with regard 


to the battle-field as to be more easily 
accessible by a descent to the plain of 
the Jordan, than over the hill3 them¬ 
selves. Or it may be (as Ewald explains 
it), a manner of quick running. Ge- 
schichte, iii. 237. 

1 2 Sam. xviii. 8, 9. 

2 Matt. iv. 1; John, x. 39, 40; xi. 54. 

3 Van de Velde (ii, 357), seems to 
have found this fountain where it has 
hitherto been vainly sought—near 
Tabakhat-Takhil. 

4 Euseb. H. E. iii. 5. 


The Last 
view of the 
Holy Land 
from the 
east. 





324 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


Between Gilboa and the mountains of Galilee the eye 
wanders over the wild plain of Jezreel, till it rests upon 
the faint blue cliffs of the extremity of Carmel which 
forms its western boundary." 1 

We may dwell on this view, for it is one which must 
have been again and again reproduced under like circum¬ 
stances. From these heights Abner in his flight from the 
Philistines, and David in his flight from Absalom, and 
the Israelites on their way to Babylon, and the Christian 
Jews of Pella, caught the last glimpse of their familiar 
mountains. There is one plaintive strain which sums 
up all these feelings ;—the 42nd Psalm. Its date and 
authorship are uncertain, but the place is, beyond doubt, 
the trans-Jordanic hills, which always behold, as they are 
always beheld from, western Palestine. As before the 
eyes of the exile, the ‘gazelle' of the forests of Gilead 
panted after the fresh streams of water which thence 
descend to the Jordan, so his soul panted after God, from 
whose outward presence he was shut out. The river, with 
its winding rapids, “ deep calling to deep," lay between him 
and his home. All that he could now do was to remember 
the past, as he stoqd “in the land of Jordan," as he saw 
the peaks of “ Hermon," as he found himself on the eastern 
heights of Mizar, 2 which reminded him <jf his banishment 
and solitude. As we began, so we end this brief account 
of the Persean hills. They are the “ Pisgah'' of the earlier 
history : to the later history they occupy the pathetic 
relation that has been immortalised in the name of the 
long ridge from which the first and the last view of 
Granada is obtained; they are “ the Last Sigh" of the 
Israelite exile. 

1 Van de Velde, ii. 355. tained. But it must have been some- 

2 Ps. xlii. 1, 6. What special moun- where on the eastern side, 
tain is thus intended, cannot be ascer- 


CHAPTER IX. 


PLAIN OF ESDKAELON. 

Rev. xvi. 16. “He gathered them together into a place called in the 
Hebrew tongue, Ar-Mageddon.” 


General features:—I. Boundary of northern and central tribes. II. Battle¬ 
field. 1. Victory over Sisera—2. Victory over the Midianites— 
3. Defeat of Saul—4. Defeat of Josiah. III. Richness and fertility of 
Issachar—Jezreel—Eugannim. IV. Tabor—Sanctuary of the northern 
tribes. V. Carmel—Scene of Elijah’s sacrifice. VI. Nain. 





PLAIN OF ESDRAELON. 


On descending from the hills of Manasseh, the 
traveller leaves the province of Samaria, and enters on that 
of Galilee, embracing two spheres of wonderful, though 
most different, interest,—the great battle-field of Jewish 
history, and the chief scene of Our Lord’s ministrations. 
It is the former of these two distinct spheres that first 
claims our attention. 

To any one who has traversed the almost undistinguish- 
able undulations of hill and valley from Hebron to Samaria, 
it is a striking contrast and relief to come upon a 
natural feature so remarkable as the Plain of Esdraelon. 
No better test of Dr. Robinson’s 1 high geographical 
powers can be given than an ocular comparison of his 
description of the plain with its actual localities. There are 
various points from which it can be seen to great advan¬ 
tage. The heights above Jenin, the summit of Tabor, and 
the eastern end of Carmel, may be especially mentioned. 
Its peculiarities are briefly told. It is a wide rent of about 
twelve miles in width, between the mass of southern Pales¬ 
tine which we have just left, and the bolder mountains of 
northern Palestine, which are in fact the roots of Lebanon. 
It consists of an uneven plain, running right from the 
shores of the Mediterranean Sea on the west, to the valley 
of the Jordan on the east. Its central and widest portion 
reaches straight across without interruption from the hills 


General 

features. 


1 See Robinson, B. R., vol. ii., p. 227, fying this accuracy on the spot. For 

230. I had every opportunity of veri- the details I refer to the map. 





323 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


of Samaria to those of Galilee. This is what, for the sake 
of distinction, may be specially termed “the plain of 
Megiddo” On the west and the east, though never 
losing its free and open character, it is broken and con¬ 
tracted. On the west it is narrowed into a pass, through 
which flows its only stream, the Kishon ; and beyond 
this the plain opens out again, as already described, 1 2 round 
the Bay of Acre, watered by a stream of shorter course, 
the Belus, descending from the hills of Galilee imme¬ 
diately above. On the east it rises into a slight elevation 
which forms the water-shed of the country,—a peculiarity 
which it shares with the vale of Shechem and the vale of 
Coele-Syria, where the rise which divides the streams is 
equally imperceptible. From thence, on the one side, 
descends the Kishon; its winding course, from which it 
derives its name, indicating at the same time the almost 
uninterrupted level through which it passes. On the 
other side, towards the Jordan, descend three branches 
having much the same relation to the main body of the 
plain as the “ legs/' as they are called, of Como and Lecco 
bear to the main body of the Lake of Como. Each of 
these branches is bounded by nearly isolated ranges, 
rising out of the plain itself, namely, Mount Gilboa, that 
commonly called Little Herrnon' by English travellers, 
but “Duliy” by the natives,—and Mount Tabor, which is 
an offshoot from the hills of Galilee. The southernmost of 
these branches is a cul-de-sac. The central branch makes 
a rapid descent to the Jordan, and is more properly 
known by the name of the “ Valley of Jezreel,” which, 
in its Greek form of “ Esdraelon,” has been communicated 
to the whole plain. The northernmost branch, between 
Little Herrnon and Tabor, also descends to the Jordan, 
but, in so doing, opens to the north-east into a side-plain, 
as it were, distinguished by the mountain called the Horns 
of Hattin,—enclosed between the hills of Galilee and those 
which immediately skirt the Sea of Tiberias. 

The aspect of the plain itself in spring-time is of a vast 


1 See Chapter VI. lxxxix. 12; and has no foundation in 

2 The name “ Little Herrnon ” is a the Bible, 
mistaken inference from Ps. xlii. 6; 



PLAIN OF ESDRAELON & GALILEE 


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PLAIN OP ESDRAELON. 


329 


waving cornfield ; olive trees here and there springing from 
it. Perhaps its greatest peculiarity is the sight of a pro¬ 
spect so wide, so long, and so rich, with so slight a trace 
of water : the Kishon is till within a few miles of its 
mouth a mere winter torrent. The ranges of Gilboa and 
Little Hermon, as well as of the two masses of hill 
which hound it on the north and south, are almost 
entirely bare. Of the two great exceptions,—Carmel on 
the south-west, and Tabor on the north-east, I shall 
speak separately. In all of them, however, at least as 
viewed from the heights of Manasseh, a more varied 
outline is presented, which indicates an approach to a 
new form of country. Lastly, the plain and the moun¬ 
tain-sides are dotted with villages, almost all retaining 
their ancient names, and situated for the most part, 
(not like those of Judaea on hill-tops, or Samaria in deep 
valleys, but) as in Philistia, on the slopes of the ranges 
which intersect and bound the plain, or else on slight 
eminences rising out of it. 

These are the general features of this famous plain. 
Their connection with its history is obvious. 

I. First, a glance at its situation will show that, to 
a certain extent, though not in an equal degree, it formed 
the same kind of separation between the mass of Central 
Palestine and the tribes of the extreme north, as the 
Valley of the Jordan effected between that same mass and 
the trans-Jordanic tribes in the east. We shall have 
occasion to recur to this point in speaking of Galilee, 
properly so called. 

II. Secondly, it must always have been the main pas¬ 
sage for egress and regress of those nations, whether 
civilised or migratory, who, repelled from the mountain 
fastnesses of Palestine, took up their position for attack 
or defence in the level country. And bounded as it 
is by the hills of Palestine on both north and south, it 
would naturally become the arena of war between the 
lowlanders who trusted in their chariots, and the Israelite 
highlanders of the neighbouring heights. 1 To this cause 

1 See Chapter II. An apt illustra- battle-field of Scotland—the plain of 
tion is furnished by the analogous Stirling—situated in like manner at 


Boundary 
of the 
northern 
tribes. 


Battle¬ 
field of 
Palestine. 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


mainly it owes its celebrity, as the battle-field of the 
world, which has, through its adoption into the language of 
the Apocalypse, passed into a universal proverb. If that 
mysterious book proceeded from the hand of a Galilean 
fisherman, it is the more easy to understand why, with 
the scene of those many battles constantly before him, 
he should have drawn the figurative name of the final 
conflict between the hosts of good and evil from “the place 
which is called in the Hebrew tongue, Armageddon,” 1 
that is, ‘ the city or mountain of Megiddo/ 

It is remarkable, that none of the battles which secured 
the conquest of Palestine to the Israelites were fought in 
this field. Most, as we have seen, 2 took place in the 
south : one only in the north, and that 3 far away from 
Esdraelon. This was but a natural consequence of the 
general inferiority of the cavalry of Israel. Whenever 
the Israelites, in aggressive movements could choose their 
arena, they selected their own element, the mountains 
and the mountain-passes. The battles of Esdraelon, on 
the other hand, were almost all forced upon them by 
adverse or invading armies; and though some of their 
chief victories were won here, yet this plain is associated 
to the mind of an Israelite with mournful at least as 
much as with joyful recollections : two kings perished 
on its soil; and the two saddest dirges of the Jewish 
nation were evoked by the defeats of Gilboa and Megiddo. 4 
Accordingly, it is not till the time when the Canaanitish 
nations had begun to recover from the panic left by the 
victorious arms of Joshua, that we find the beginnings of 
the long series of the battles of Esdraelon which have lasted 
ever since. 

1. The first of these occasions was, that in which “the 


the opening of the highlands, and in 
like manner the scene of almost all 
the decisive battles of Scottish history. 

1 Rev. xvi. 16. Armageddon might 
be the grecised form of the Hebrew Ar, 
‘ a fortified city.’ But the probable read¬ 
ing is not Armageddon, but Harmagedon, 
(‘Ap /uayeSriv) from Hor, or Har, a 
‘ mountain.’—And even if the aspirate 
were omitted, it is analogous to the case 


of 4 Ar Gerizim/ (See Chap. V. note.) 
It is hardly necessary to add that the 
real meaning of Armageddon sets aside 
all such fanciful interpretations as have 
endeavoured to fix it in Italy or the 
Crimea. 

* See Chapters IV. and VII. 

3 See Chapter XI. 

4 1 Sam. xxxi.; 2 Chr. xxxv. 22—25. 





PLAIN OF ESDRAELON. 


331 


Lord delivered Sisera into the hand of Barak.” The double 
account of that great event in prose and verse enables us to 
fix with unusual precision its several points and circum¬ 
stances. The oppressor was Jabin, king of Hazor, successor 
and namesake of the chief who had roused the northern 
confederation against Joshua. 1 The northern regions, 
therefore, of Palestine, in the neighbourhood of his own 
capital, the northern tribes, Zebulun, Naphthali and Issa- 
char, were those which he would chiefly harass. On them 
accordingly the brunt of the battle fell. But they were 
joined also by the adjacent tribes of Central Palestine— 
Ephraim, Manasseh, and Benjamin. 2 Those only of the 
extreme west, south, and east, were wanting. 3 Both 
armies descended alike from the mountains of Naphtbali, 
but they were “drawn” to opposite points in the plain. 
Barak and Deborah, with their small body of devoted 
troops were gathered on the broad summit of Tabor; 4 
the host of Sisera, with its nine hundred iron chariots 
naturally took up its position on the level plain of 
Megiddo, on its south-western extremity by the banks 
of the Kishon, and near Taanach, 5 the name of which 
is still preserved in a village on the slope of the hills 
skirting the plain on the south. It was one of the towns 
which the Canaanites had still retained; 6 and it would, 
therefore, be a natural rallying-point for the great 
Canaanite host of Jabin hard by “the waters of Megiddo,” 
probably the pools in the bed of the Kishon. The 
Prophetess, on the summit of Tabor, gave the signal of 
the battle, when Barak was to rush down from his 
secure position and attack the army in the plain. At 
this critical moment (so Josephus 7 directly informs us, 
and so we learn indirectly from the Song of Deborah), 
a tremendous storm of sleet and hail gathered from the 


1 Lord Arthur Hervey, in his candid 
and learned work on the Genealogies 
of Christ, suggests that this narrative 
may be merely a repetition of that 
recorded in Josh. xi. 1—12. But, how¬ 
ever well such an identification of the 
two events may accord with the 
confused chronology of the period, it is 
hardly reconcilable with the geography. 


2 Jud. v. 14,15, 18. 3 Jud. v. 16,17. 

4 Ant. IV. x. 12. A village south¬ 
west of Tabor, near the sources of the 
Kishon, is called “ Sheykh Abrik” It 
is possible (Schwarze, 167), but hardly 
probable, that this 'is a recollection of 
Barak’s victoiy. 

5 Jud. v. 19. 6 Jud. i. 27. 

7 Ant. Y. v. 4. 


Deborah 
and Barak. 


Battle 
of the 
Kishon. 



332 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


Victory 
over the 
Midianites. 


east, and burst over the plain of Esdraelon, driving full 
in the faces of the advancing Canaanites. “ The stars in 
their courses fought against Sisera,” 1 and as “ the rains 
descended,” “ the wind blew ” and “ the flood came,” 2 — 
the flood of the torrent; and “ the stream ” rose in its bed, 
and “beat vehemently” against the chariots and horses 
entangled on its level shores, and “ the e torrent , of Kishon 
swept them away ; that ancient 4 torrent/ the ‘ torrent 9 
Kishon.” 3 In that wild confusion, when the strength of 
the Canaanite “ was trodden down,” and “ the horsehoofs 
were broken by the means of the pransings, the pransings 
of their mighty ones,” the captain of the host sprang 
down from his war-chariot, and fled away on his feet. 
He fled into the northern mountains, to a spot which he 
hoped would be friendly. In the upland basin of Kedesh, 
far away from their settlements of the south, a tribe of 
the Bedouin Kenites had pitched their black tents under 
the oaks, called from their encampment,—a strange sight 
amidst the regular cities and villages of the mountains,— 

‘ the oaks of the wanderers/ 4 It is needless to pursue 
the story; all the world knows the sight which Jael, 
the chieftainess of the house of Heber, showed to Barak, 
when she lifted up the curtain of the tent, and showed 
him his enemy dead, with the tent-nail driven through 
his temples. 

2. The next battle was of a very different kind, and one 
of which the present aspect of the plain can give a clearer 
image. No one in present days has passed this plain 
without seeing or hearing of the assaults of the Bedouin 
Arabs, as they stream in from the adjacent Desert. Here 
and there, by the well-side, or amongst the bushes of the 
mountains, their tents or their wild figures may always 
be seen—the terror alike of the peaceful villager and the 
defenceless traveller. What we now see on a small scale 
constantly, is but a miniature representation of the one 
great visitation which lived for ages afterwards in the 
memory of the Jewish people—the invasion, not of the 

1 Jud. v. 20. 4 Mistranslated “The plain of Zaa- 

2 Matt. vii. 25—27. See Chap. XIII. naim.” Jud. iv. 11. 

3 Jud. v. 21, 22. 


PLAIN OP ESDRAELON. 


333 


civilised nations of Assyria or Egypt, or of the Canaanite 
cities, but of the wild population of the Desert itself—“the 
Midianites, the Amalekites, and the Children of the East." 1 
They came up with all the accompaniments of Bedouin 
life, “with their cattle, their tents, and their camels;" they 
came up and “ encamped" against the Israelites, after 
“ Israel had sown," and “ destroyed the increase of the 
earth," and all the cattle 2 [in the maritime plain] “till 
thou come unto Gaza; as 4 locusts J for multitude, both they 
and their camels without number.” The very aspect and 
bearing of their sheykhs is preserved to us. The two 
lesser chiefs, (“ princes " as they are called in our version,) 
in their names of Oreb and Zeeb, “ the Raven " and 44 the 
Wolf," present curious counterparts of the title of 44 the 
Leopard," now given to their modern successor, Abd-el- 
Aziz, chief of the Bedouins beyond the Jordan. The two 
higher sheykhs or 44 kings," Zebah and Zalmunna, are 
mounted on dromedaries, themselves gay with scarlet 
mantles, and crescent-ornaments and golden earrings, 3 
their dromedaries with ornaments and chains like them¬ 
selves ; and as in outward appearance, so in the high spirit 
and lofty bearing which they showed at their last hour, 
they truly represented the Arabs who scour the same 
regions at the present day. 

Such an incursion produced on the Israelites amongst 
their ordinary wars a similar impression to that of the 
invasion of the Huns amongst the comparatively civilised 
invasions of the Teutonic tribes. They fled into their 
mountain fastnesses and caves as the only refuge; the 
wheat even of the upland valleys of Manasseh had to be 
concealed from the rapacious plunderers. 4 The whole 
country was thus for the first time in the hands of the 
Arabs. But it was in the plain of Esdraelon that then, as 

1 Jud. vi. 3. There is another noma¬ 
dic incursion at a later time, of which 
but few traces are left—that of the 
Scythians—or nomads of the north, 
in the reign of King Josiah, known 
only through the brief notice in He¬ 
rodotus, and the allusions in the writ¬ 
ings of Zephaniah and Jeremiah. One 
of those few traces, however, shows 


that they settled like their prede¬ 
cessors and successors in the plain of 
Esdraelon. From them, Bethshan, on 
the sides of Mount Gilboa, probably 
derived its Greek name of “Scytho- 
polis.” (Pliny, v. 18). 

2 Jud. vi. 3, 4, 5. 

3 Jud. viii. 21, 26. 

4 Jud. vi. 11. 


334 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


Battle of 
Jezreel. 


now, the Children of the Desert fixed their head quarters. 
“In the valley of Jezreel ,” 1 that is, in the central eastern 
branch of the plain, commanding the long descent to the 
Jordan, and thus to their own eastern deserts, “ they lay 
all along the valley like ‘ locusts’ for multitude,” and “ their 
camels”—unwonted sight in the pastures of Palestine— 
“ were without number, as the sand by the sea-side ” on 
the wide margin of the Bay of Acre, “for multitude .” 2 As 
in the invasion of Sisera, so now, the nearest tribes were 
those which first were moved by a sense of their common 
danger. To the noblest of the tribe of Manasseh—to 
one whose appearance was “ as the son of a king,” and 
whose brothers, already ruthlessly slain by the wild 
invaders on the adjacent heights of Tabor, were “each 
one like the children of kings ”—was entrusted the charge 
of gathering together the forces of his countrymen. All 
Manasseh was with him ; and from the other side of the 
plain there came Zebulun and Naphthali, and even the 
reluctant Asher, to join him . 3 On the slope of Mount 
Gilboa the Israelites were encamped by a spring, possibly 
the same as that elsewhere 4 called ‘ the spring of Jezreel,’ 
but here, from the well-known trial by which Gideon 
tested the energy of his army, called “the ‘spring’ of 
trembling .” 5 On the northern side of the valley, but 
apparently deeper down in the descent towards the 
Jordan , 6 by one of those slight eminences 7 which have 
been before described as characteristic of the whole 


1 Jud. vi. 33. 2 Jud. vii. 12. 

3 Jud. vi. 35. 

4 1 Sam. xxix. 1, in the Auth. Vers, 

incorrectly “ a fountain.” 

5 Jud. vii. 1. “The * spring’ (mis¬ 
translated “well”) of Harod;” that is of 
‘ trembling,’ in evident allusion to the 
repetition of the same word in verse 3, 

“ Whoever is fearful and ‘ trembling.’ ” 
The modeirn name of this spring 
is “Ain Jahlood,”—the “spring of 
Goliath.” This may perhaps originate, 
as Ritter observes, in a confused recol¬ 
lection of the Philistine battle in the 
time of David, but more probably arose 
from the false tradition current in the 
sixth century, that this was the scene 

of David’s combat with’Goliath (Ritter; 
Jordan, p. 416). Schwarze (164) inge¬ 


niously conjectures that it is a reminis¬ 
cence of an older name attaching to the 
whole mountain—and thus explains the 
cry of Gideon; “Whoeveris fearful and 
afraid, let him return, and depart early 
from Mount Gilead.” But “Gilead” may 
there be either a corruption of (what in 
Hebrew strongly resembles it) “ Gilboa,” 
—or we may adopt Ewald’s explanation, 
that it was the war-cry of Manasseh— 
eastern as well as western—and that 
hence “Mount Gilead” was employed 
as a general phrase for the whole tribe. 
(Geschichte, 2nd edit. ii. 500.) 

6 Hence the expression, “the host 
of Midian was beneath him in the 
valley.” Jud. vii. 8. 

7 “ Gibeah,” rightly translated hill, 
as distinct from mountain. Jud. vii. 1. 


PLAIN OP ESDRAELON. 


335 


plain, was spread the host of the Midianites. It was 
night, when from the mountain side Gideon and his 
servant descended to the vast encampment. All along 
the valley, within and around the tents, the thousands of 
Arabs lay wrapt 1 in sleep, or resting from their day’s 
plunder, and their innumerable camels couched for the 
night in deep repose round about them. One of the 
sleepers, startled from his slumbers, was telling his dream 
to his fellow,— a characteristic and expressive dream for 
a Bedouin, even without its terrible interpretation—that a 
cake of barley bread, from those rich corn-fields, those 
numerous threshing-floors of the peaceful inhabitants 
whom they had conquered, rolled into the camp of 
Midian and struck a tent, and overturned it, so that it 
lay along on the ground. 2 Reassured by this good omen, 
Gideon returned for his three hundred trusty followers, 
the trumpets were blown, the torches blazed forth, the 
shout of Israel, always terrible, always like “ the shout of 
a king,” 3 broke through the stillness of the midnight air ; 
and the sleepers sprang from their rest, and ran hithel¬ 
and thither with the dissonant “cries” 4 so peculiar to the 
Arab race. “ And the Lord set every man’s sword 
against his fellow, even through all the host and the 
host fled headlong down the descent to the Jordan, to the 
spots known as the 'house of the Acacia’ (Beth-shittah), 
and the “border” of the 'meadow of the dance’ (Abel- 
meholah). 5 These spots were in the Jordan-valley, as 
their names indicate, 6 under the mountains of Ephraim. 
To the Ephraimites, therefore, messengers were sent to 
intercept the northern fords of the Jordan at Beth- 
barahJ There the second conflict took place, and Oreb 
and Zeeb were seized and put to the sword, the one 
on a rock, the other at a winepress, on the spot where 
they were taken. The two higher sheykhs, Zebah and 
Zalmunna, had already passed before the Ephraimites 

1 Such is the form of the Hebrew mountains—the “ meadow ” is peculiar 

word translated •'‘lay.” Jud. vii. 12. to the streams of the Jordan. Com- 

2 Jud. vii. 13. pare also Zererath (verse 22) with 

3 Numb, xxiii. 21. 2 Chr.iv. 17. See Appendix, Abel. 

4 Jud. vii. 21. 5 Jud. vii. 22. ? The LXX reads B aid'fjpa. See 

6 The “ acacia” is never found on the Chapter VII. 


Battle of 

Beth- 

barah. 


336 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


Defeat of 
SauL 


appeared; Gideon, therefore, wbo had now reached the 
fords from the scene of his former victory, pursued them 
into the eastern territory of his own tribe Manasseh. 
The first village which he reached in the Jordan-valley 
was that which from the “ booths ” of Jacob's ancient 
encampment bore the name of Succoth 1 : the next higher 
up in the hills was that which from the vision of the 
same patriarch bore the name of Peniel, ‘the Face of 
God/ with its lofty watch-tower. Far up in the eastern 
Desert—amongst their own Bedouin countrymen “dwelling 
in tents ”—“ the host ” of Zebah and Zalmunna “ was 
secure” when Gideon burst upon them. Here a third 
victory completed the conquest. The two chiefs were 
caught and slain—the tower of Peniel was razed; and 
the princes of Succoth were scourged with the thorny 
brauches of the acacia groves of their own valley. 2 

This success was perhaps the most signal ever obtained 
by the arms of Israel; at least, the one which most lived 
in the memory of the people. The ‘ spring 5 of Gideon's 
encampment—the rock and the winepress which witnessed 
the death of the two Midianite chiefs, were called after 
the names then received; and the Psalmists and Prophets 
long afterwards referred with exultation to the fall of 
“ Oreb and Zeeb, of Zebah and Zalmunna, who said, Let 
us take to ourselves the ‘ pastures' 3 of God in possession'' 
—“the breaking of the rod of the oppressor, as in the 
day of Midian." 4 Gideon himself was by it raised to 
almost royal state, and the establishment of the hereditary 
monarchy all but anticipated in him and his family. 

3. From the most memorable victory we pass to the most 
memorable defeat of Israel. The next great engagement 
which took place in this plain, and nearly on the same 
spot, was that of Saul with the Philistines. 5 The Philistines 

1 Gen. xxxiii. 17. See Appendix, Soc. the same spot. “ Aphek,” which means 

2 Jud. viii. 16. “strength,” and thus is naturally applied 

3 Such is the more accurate transla- to any fort or fastness, is so common a 

tion, as well as the more vivid in name in Palestine, that its mention in 
the mouths of the nomad chiefs. Ps. 1 Sam. xxix. 1, is not of itself sufficient 
l xxxiii . 12. to identify it with the spot so called 

4 Isa. ix. 4. near Jerusalem, in 1 Sam. iv. 1; and 

5 1 Sam. xxix. xxxi. It is possible the scene of the first Philistine victory 
that the battle in which the Ark was must therefore remain uncertain, since 
taken, and the sons of Eli killed, was on there is nothing in the details of the 


PLAIN OF ESDRAELON. 


337 


appear to have gathered all their strength for a final 
effort; and having marched up the sea coast, to have 
encamped, like the Midianites, in that part of the plain 
properly called “the valley of Jezreel." The spot on 
which their encampment was fixed was on the northern 
side of the valley, in one passage called Aphek, and in 
another Shunem. The name of Aphek has perished, but that 
of Shunem is preserved, with a slight alteration, in a village 
which still exists on the slope of the range called Little 
Hermon,—possibly the same as the “ Hill of Moreh,”— 
on the north of the valley, under which had been pitched 
the tents of Zebah and Zalmunna. On the opposite side, 
nearly on the site of Gideon's camp, on the rise of Mount 
Gilboa, hard by the “spring of Jezreel," was the army of 
Saul, the Israelites as usual keeping to the heights, whilst 
their enemies clung to the plain. It was, whilst the two 
armies were in this position, that Saul made the disguised 
and adventurous journey by night over the shoulder of 
the ridge on which the Philistines were encamped, to 
visit the witch at Endor, situated immediately on the 
other side of the range, and immediately facing Tabor. 
Large caves which, at least to modern notions, accord 
with the residence of the Necromancer, still perforate the 
rocky sides of the hill. 1 

The onset took place the next morning. The Phi¬ 
listines instantly drove the Israelites up the slopes of 
Gilboa, and however widely the rout may have carried 
the mass of the fugitives down the valley to the Jordan, 
the thick of the fight must have been on the heights 
themselves ; for it was “ on Mount Gilboa" that the wild 
Amalekite, wandering like his modern countrymen over the 


battle to fix it. But the mention of 
Ebenezer in 1 Sam. iv. 1, compared with 
the mention of the same name in 1 Sam. 
vii. 12, in connection with Mizpeh, would 
induce us to fix it in the south, and 
therefore identify it with the “ Aphek ” 
mentioned in Josephus (Bell. Jud. II. 
xix. 1), as situated near the western 
entrance of the pass of Bethhoron. The 
same doubt attaches to the scene of 
the defeat of Benhadad (1 Kings xx. 
26), also at “Aphek.” But there again 


the mention of the "‘plain ” under the 
name “ Mishor ,”—in every other in¬ 
stance applied to the table-lands on the 
east of the Jordan (see Appendix, *. v.) 
—points to the “Aphaca,” mentioned 
by Eusebius, to the east of the sea of 
Galilee, and possibly preserved in the 
modern “ Feik.” 

1 Van de Velde (ii. 383). I only saw 
the spot from Tabor, which also com¬ 
mands the relative view of Bethshan 
and Gilead, as given in p. 338. 

z 


Battle of 
Mount Gil¬ 
boa. 


338 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


upland waste, “ chanced ” to see the dying king ; and “ on 
Mount Gilboa” the corpses of Saul and his three sons 
were found by the Philistines the next day. So truly 
has David caught the peculiarity and position of the 
scene which he had himself visited only a few days before 
the battle 1 —“The beauty of Israel is slain upon thy 
high places: 0 Jonathan, thou wast slain upon thine high 
places ” as though the bitterness of death and defeat were 
aggravated by being not in the broad and hostile j^lain, 
but on their own familiar and friendly mountains. And 
with an equally striking touch of truth, as the image 
of that bare and bleak and jagged ridge rose before him 
with its one green strip of table-land, where jorobably the 
last struggle was fought,—the more bare and bleak 
from its unusual contrast with the fertile plain from 
which it springs—he broke out into the pathetic strain 
-—“Ye mountains of Gilboa, let there be no rain upon 
you, neither dew, nor fields of offerings: for there the 
shield of the mighty was vilely cast away,—the shield of 
Saul, as though he had not been anointed with oil.” 2 

On the slope of this range—still looking down into the 
Valley of Jezreel, but commanding also the view of the 
Jordan—a high spur of rock projects, on which stands the 
village of Beisan, once the city of Bethshan. It was one 
of the Canaanite strongholds which had never been taken 
by the Israelites, 3 and accordingly was at once open to the 
victorious Philistines. They stripped and dismembered 
the royal corpse. The head was sent to the great Temple 
of Dagon, probably at Ashdod ; but the armour was dedi¬ 
cated in the Temple of the Canaanite Ashtaroth at Beth¬ 
shan, 4 and the headless body with the corpses of his three 
sons fastened to the wall, overhanging the open place in 
Bethshan front of the city gate. 5 That wall overlooked the valley of 
Gutad.^" J° r( l an > i n t° which the Valley of Jezreel there opens. 
In the hills of Gilead, which are seen rising immediately 
beyond, was a town which Saul had once saved from a 


1 1 Sam. xxix. 2. 

2 2 Sam. i. 6, 19, 21, 25. 

3 Jud. i. 27. 

4 That this was the distribution 


5 Such is the proper force of “the 
street of Bethshan,” 2 Sam. xxi. 12. 


of 1 Sam. xxxi. 10, and 1 Chr. x S, 
10 . 


cannot be doubted on a comparison 


PLAIN OF ESDRABLON. 


339 


cruel enemy. 1 The inhabitants of Jabesh-Gilead remem¬ 
bered their benefactor. 2 Their “ valiant men ** came, 
under cover of the “night/* across the Jordan, carried off 
the bodies, and buried them under ‘ the terebinth* 3 of their 
own city, where they lay till they were disinterred by David, 
to be buried in their ancestral cave at Zelah in Benjamin. 4 

4. The next battle—the last of which we have any 
distinct notice—was hardly less mournful than that of Saul. 
It was in the last days of the Jewish monarchy, when 
the northern kingdom had been already destroyed, that 
Palestine was first exposed to the disastrous fate which 
involved her in so long a series of troubles from this time 
forward—that of being the debateable ground between 
Egypt and the further East ; first, under the Pharaohs 
and the rulers of Babylon ; then under the Ptolemies and 
Seleucidse. “ In the days of Josiah, Pharaoh-Necho king 
of Egypt went up against the king of Assyria to the 
Euphrates/*—possibly landing his army at Accho, more 
probably, as the expression seems to indicate, following the 
track of his predecessor Psammetichus, and advancing up 
the maritime plain till he turned into the plain of Esdraelon, 
thence to penetrate into the passes of the Lebanon. 
“ King Josiah,’* in self-defence, and perhaps as an ally of 
the Assyrian king, “ went against him.** 5 The engagement 
took place in the central portion of the plain—the scene 
of Sisera’s defeat — “the plain of Megiddo.** 6 The 
“ Egyptian archers,** in their long array, so well known 
from their sculptured monuments, “ shot at King Josiah/* 
as he rode in state in his royal chariot, and “ he was sore 
wounded/* and placed in his “ second 7 chariot ’* of reserve, 
and carried to Jerusalem to die. In that one tragical event, 
all other notices of the battle are absorbed. The exact scene 
of the encounter is not known. It would seem, however, 
to have been at a spot called after the name of a Syrian 
divinity—“ Hadad-Kimmon*’—that the king fell. On this 
consecrated place were uttered the lamentations, 8 con- 

1 1 Sam. si. 1—11. 4 2 Sam. xxi. 14. 

2 1 Sam. xxxi. 11. Jabesh (Yabes) 6 2 Kings xxiii. 29; 2 Chr. xxxv. 
was identified by Dr. Robinson on his 20, 22. 

second journey. 6 “Beka.” 2 Chr. xxxv. 22. 

3 1 Chr. x. 12. Elah. See Appen- 7 2 Chr. xxxv. 24. 

dix, s.v. 8 Zech. xii. 11. 

2 2 


Defeat of 
Josiah. 


Battle of 
Megiddo. 


340 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


Richness 
of the 
plain of 
Esdraelon. 


Character 

oflssachar. 


tinued at Jerusalem by one whose strains were only 
inferior in pathos to those of David over Saul;—“ and all 
Judah and Jerusalem mourned for Josiah, and Jere¬ 
miah lamented for Josiah ; and all the singing men 
and the singing women spake of Josiah in their lamenta¬ 
tions to this day, and made them an ordinance in Israel : 
and, behold, they are written in the Lamentations.” 1 

Other battles there have been in later times—in the 
Crusades, and in the wars of Napoleon, which confirm 
the ancient celebrity of the Plain of Esdraelon ; but of 
those one only deserves to be named in conjunction with 
these of which I have been speaking—that of Hattin, 2 
which will be best considered elsewhere. 

III. But there is another aspect under which the Plain 
of Esdraelon must be considered. Every traveller has re¬ 
marked on the richness of its soil—the exuberance of its 
crops. Once more the palm appears, waving its stately 
tresses over the village enclosures. The very weeds are a 
sign of what in better hands the vast plain might become. 
The thoroughfare which it forms for every passage, from 
east to west, from north to south, made it in peaceful times 
the most available and eligible possession of Palestine. It 
was the frontier of Zebulun—“ Kejoice, 0 Zebulun, in thy 
goings out.” But it was the special portion of Issachar; 
and in its condition—thus exposed to the good and evil fate 
of the beaten highway of Palestine,—we read the fortunes 
of the tribe which, for the sake of this possession, con¬ 
sented to sink into the half-nomadic state of the Bedouins 
who wandered over it,—into the condition of tributaries 
to the Canaanite tribes, whose iron chariots drove 
victoriously through it. “ Rejoice, 0 Issachar, in thy 
tents . . . they shall suck of the abundance of the seas 
[from Acre], and of the [glassy] treasures hid in the sands 3 
[of the torrent Belus]. . . . Issachar is a strong ass, 

couching down between two 4 troughs : ; and he saw that 
rest was good, and the land that it was pleasant; and 
bowed his shoulder to bear, and became a servant unto 
tribute.” 4 Once only did the sluggish tribe shake off this 


1 2 Chr. xxxv. 25. 

2 See Chapter X. 


3 Deut. xxxiii. 18, 19. 

4 Gen. xlix. 14, 15. 


PLAIN OP ESDRAELON. 


341 


yoke ; when under the heavy pressure of Sisera, “ the 
4 chiefs’ of Issachar were with Deborah.” 1 But still they 
were looked up to—perhaps on account of this very 
choice of land—as “ men that had understanding of the 
times, to know what Israel ought to do/’ 2 —and they, 
with the neighbouring tribes, were foremost in sending to 
David, on his accession, all the good things that their soil 
produced, “bread, and meat, and meal, cakes of figs, bunches 
of raisins, and wine, and oil, on asses, and on camels, and on 
mules, and on oxen, .... for there was joy in Israel.” 3 
In accordance with this general character of the plain, 
were some of its special localities. The park-like aspect 
which has already been noticed in the hills between 
Shechem and Samaria, breaks out again in this fertile 
district. The same luxuriant character which had ren¬ 
dered this whole region the favourite haunt of the four 
northern tribes, rendered it also the favourite resort of 
the later kings of Israel. Of all the numerous villages 
that now rise out of the plain on the gentle swells which 
break its level surface, the most commanding in situation is 
that which, in its modern name of Zerin, retains the ancient 
name of Jezreel. As Baasha had chosen Tirzah, as Omri 
had chosen Samaria, so Ahab chose Jezreel as his regal 
residence. It never indeed superseded his father’s capital 
at Samaria, as that had superseded Shechem ; but it was 
the chief seat of his dynasty for three successive reigns ; 
and its importance is evident, from the fact that it gave 
its name to the whole plain, of which it thus became the 
chief city. It is now a mere collection of hovels. But its 
situation at the opening of the central eastern valley, so 
often described, commanding the view towards Carmel 
on one side, and to the Jordan on the other, still justifies 
its selection by Ahab and his Queen, as the seat of their 
court , 4 and its natural features still illustrate the most 
striking incidents in the scenes in which it appears in the 
Sacred History, of the overthrow of the house of Ahab. 
We see how up the valley from the Jordan, Jehu’s 
troop might be seen advancing,—how in Naboth’s “field” 

3 1 Chr. xii. 40, 

4 1 Kings xxi. i ; 2 Kings ix. 30. 


Park and 
palace of 
Jezreel. 


1 Jud. v. 15. 

2 1 Chr. xii. 32 


342 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


Tabor. 


the two sovereigns met the relentless soldier, — how, 
whilst Joram died on the spot, Ahaziah drove down 
the westward plain, towards the mountain-pass by the 
beautiful village of En-gannim , 1 but was overtaken in the 
ascent, and died of his wounds at Megiddo; how in the 
open place, which, as usual in Eastern towns, lay before 
the gates of Jezreel, the body of the Queen was trampled 
under the hoofs of Jehu’s horses ; how the dogs 2 gathered 
round it, as even to this day, in the wretched village now 
seated on the ruins of the once splendid city of Jezreel, 
they prowl on the mounds without the walls for the offal 
and carrion thrown out to them to consume. 

These characteristics of the plain—perhaps the most 
secular in sacred history,—are not the only or the highest 
associations with which its natural features are connected. 
Two points still remain,—the most interesting in its whole 
expanse. 

IV. Two mountains, the glory of the tribe of Issachar, 
stand out among the bare and rugged hills of Palestine, 
and even among those of their own immediate neighbour¬ 
hood, remarkable for the verdure which climbs—a rare 
sight in Eastern scenery—to their very summits. One 
of these is Tabor. This strange and beautiful mountain 
is distinguished alike in form and in character from all 
around it. As seen, where it is usually first seen by the 
traveller, from the north-west of the plain, it towers, like 
a dome—as seen from the east, like a long arched 
mound—over the monotonous undulations of the sur¬ 
rounding hills, from which it stands completely isolated, 
except by a narrow neck of rising ground, uniting it 
to the mountain-range of Galilee. It is not what 
Europeans would call a wooded hill, because its trees 
stand all apart from each other. But it is so thickly 
studded with them, as to rise from the plain like a mass 


1 Beth-gan, 2 Kings ix. 27. The 
name translated in the English version 
“ the garden-house,” is rightly pre¬ 
served in the LXX. It -is evidently 
the same as “ En-gannim,” ‘ the spring 
of the gardens’ (Jos. xix. 21; xxi. 29); 
and as the modern Jenin, well known 


as the village on which all travellers 
descend from the hills of Manasseh. 
The gax-den-like character of the spot 
is still preserved; and the ‘‘spring” 
bubbles up in the centre of the vil¬ 
lage. • 

2 So I chanced to see them there. 


PLAIN OF ESDRAELON. 


343 


of verdure. Its sides much resemble the scattered glades 
in the outskirts of the New Forest. Its summit—a broken 
oblong—is an alternation of shade and greensward, that 
seems made for a national festivity ; broad and varied, 
and commanding wide views of the plain from end to end. 

This description of itself tells us that it is not that 
peaked height which we imagine as the scene of the great 
event with which later traditions have connected it. The 
Transfiguration, as we shall elsewhere find , 1 probably 
took place far away. But we see in its insulated 
situation the probable origin of the mistake which trans¬ 
ferred to the mountain of the Transfiguration the word 
“ apart,” which is really intended only for the disciples ;— 
we see also everywhere scattered around the ruins of the 
town and fortress, which existing here, as it seems, at the 
very time of the Gospel History, render the truth of the 
tradition next to impossible. Still, if it must lose that last 
crowning glory, those glades and those ruins recall to us its 
old associations undisturbed. The fortress, defended and 
repaired by Josephus, carries us back to the selection of 
this strong position for the encampment of Barak, before 
his descent upon Sisera. The open glades on its wide 
summit carry us back yet earlier, to a time, of which the 
very memory has perished, when it was the sanctuary of 
the northern tribes, if not of the whole nation. The aspect 
of these glades, so fitted, as I have said, for festive assem¬ 
blies, exactly agrees with Herder's view , 2 that Tabor is 
intended, when it is said of Issachar and Zebulun, that 
“ they shall call the people unto the mountain; there shall 
they offer sacrifices of righteousness .” 3 It is true that, 
amidst the changes and wars which disordered the relations 
of the tribes, nothing afterwards is expressly said of the 
sacredness of Tabor. But in the gathering of the northern 


1 See Chap. XI. For the arguments 
against the connection of Tabor with 
the Transfiguration, see Robinson, B. R., 
iii. p. 221. 

2 GeistderHebraische Poesie (Herder, 
vol. xxxiv.p. 215.) The'description given 

above was written from the spot, with¬ 
out any recollection, at the moment, 
of Herder’s view. “ According to the 


Midrash Galkat on Deut. xxxiii. 19, it 
is the mountain on which the Temple 
ought of right to have been built . . . 
had it not been for the express revela¬ 
tion which ordered the sanctuary to be 
built on Mount Moriah.” (Schwarze, 

p. 71.) 

3 Deut. xxxiii. 19. 


Not the 
scene of the 
Trans¬ 
figuration. 


The For¬ 
tress and 
sanctuary 
of the 
northern 
tribes. 


344 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


Carmel. 


The 

Convent. 


tribes, first under Barak , 1 and again, as it would seem, 
under the brothers of Gideon , 2 and long afterwards, in 
“the net spread abroad on Tabor ” 3 by the idolatrous 
priests of Issachar, some trace is discernible of the 
original purpose for which its striking situation and its 
pleasant forests so well adapted it. At any rate, we can 
understand how, when Psalmists and Prophets saw in the 
wide view from its summit, the snowy top of Herinon in 
the far north, and Carmel in the west,—they could 
truly feel “ Tabor 4 and Hermon shall rejoice in thy 
name ; ” that surely “ as Tabor is among the mountains, 
and Carmel 5 by the sea,” God's judgments would come. 

V. This brings us to the second great historical mountain 
of Esdraelon. “ As Tabor ” is through its peculiar form 
and elevation “ among the mountains ”—so is “ Carmel,” 
with its long projecting ridge, “ by the sea.” The name 
of Tabor is probably derived from its height—that of 
Carmel is certainly taken from the garden-like appearance 
which it shares with Tabor alone, and which, as it has no 
peculiarity of shape, is its chief distinction . 6 By this, its 
protracted range of eighteen miles in length, bounding the 
whole of the southern corner of the great plain, is marked 
out from the surrounding scenery. Bocky dells, with 
deep jungles of copse , 7 are found there alone in Palestine. 
And though to European eyes, it presents a forest- 
beauty only of an inferior order, there is no wonder that 
to an Israelite it seemed “ the Park ” of his country—that 
the tresses of the bride's head should be compared to its 
woods, 8 —that its ‘ornaments ' 9 should be regarded as the 
type of natural beauty,—that the withering of its fruits 
should be considered as the type of national desolation . 10 

It is not the bluff promontory running into the sea, and 
crowned by its Convent, that represents, or even pro¬ 
fesses to represent, the scene which is the chief pride of the 

1 Jud. iv. 6. through briars and bushes as a wild 

2 Jud. viii. 18. beast.” (Mandeville, Early Travellers, 

3 Hos. v. 1. p. 186; Quaresmius, II. 8, 34.) 

4 Ps. lxxxix. 12. 5 Jer. xlvi. 18. 8 Cant. vii. 5. 

® Appendix, s. v. 9 Isa. xxxv. 2. Translated “ excel- 

7 This was probably the reason of its lency.” 

selection in later legends as the scene 10 Amos, i. 2; Isaiah xxxiii. 9; Nahum 

of the death of Cain, who there “ went i. 4. 


PLAIN OF ESDRAELON. 


345 


history of Carmel. The Convent derives its interest not 
from any connection, real or pretended, with the Prophet 
Elijah, but from the celebrated order of Barefooted monks 
that has sprung from it, and carried the name of Carmel 
into the monasteries of Europe. The large caves, indeed, 
which exist under the western cliffs—frequented by 
Christians, Jews, and Mussulmans, who have there left 
memorials in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, and in the niches 
and prayer-mats of Arab devotion—may have been the 
shelter of Elijah and the persecuted prophets. The 
winding path through the rocks to the sea-shore below, 
must have been that by which Pythagoras, according to 
the idea of his biographer—himself a pilgrim to this 
“ haunted strand ”—descended, to embark in the Egyptian 
ship which he saw sailing beneath him . 1 Either on this 
same point of Mount Carmel, or at the modern village of 
Caipha immediately below it, was the village of Ecbatana, 
in which Cambyses died on his return from Egypt to 
Persia , 2 thus unexpectedly realising the prophecy that he 
should perish at Ecbatana. But the Convent itself is of 
comparatively recent date, the last effort of the Crusades ; 
an offshoot of the fortress of Acre in the adjacent bay, 
founded by St. Louis in his brief and only visit to the 
shores of Palestine, and still bearing the sign of its French 
origin in the French flag which is unfurled on its towers, 
whenever a French ship or French steamer appears in 
sight on the Syrian waters. 

But it could never have been here that the great 
sacrifice took place which formed the crisis in Elijah’s life, 
and which is brought before us with such minuteness of 
detail as to invite us to a full contemplation of all its 
circumstances. Carmel, as we have seen, is not so much 
a mountain as a ridge, an upland park, extending for 
many miles into the interior of the country. At the 
eastern extremity, which is also the highest point of the 
whole ridge, is a spot marked out alike by tradition 
and by natural features as one of the most authentic 

1 Jamblichus,Vit.Pyth.c. 3 (Williams 2 Herod, iii. 62, 64. Plin. v. 19, 8, 
in Dictionary of Classical Geography— 17. 

Carmel). 


The scene 
of Elijah’s 
Sacrifice. 


346 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


localities of the Old Testament history . 1 The tradition is 
unusually trustworthy. It is one of the very few, perhaps 
the only case in which the recollection of an alleged event 
has been actually retained in the native Arabic nomen¬ 
clature. Many names of towns have been so preserved, 
but here is no town, only a shapeless ruin, yet the spot 
has a name, “ El-Maharrakah,” “ the Burning,” or “ the 
Sacrifice .” 2 The Druses, some of whom inhabit the 
neighbouring villages, come here from a distance to 
perform a yearly sacrifice ; and though it is possible that 
this practice may have originated the name, yet it is more 
probable that the practice itself arose from some earlier 
tradition attached to the spot. Nor has the tradition, 
whatever it be, any connection with the convent, which 
would in that case either have been founded nearer to the 
scene, or have fixed the scene nearer to itself. Indeed, it is a 
proof of the superiority of the Latin to the Greek monastic 
orders, that instead of inventing a spot, after the manner 
of the monks of Sinai, within the neighbourhood of their 
own walks, the monks of Carmel have left undisturbed the 
associations of a spot so remote from their convent, that 
none of its existing members have visited it more than 
once in their stay . 3 

But, be the tradition good or bad, the localities adapt 
themselves to the event in almost every particular. The 
summit thus marked out is the extreme eastern 4 point of 
the range, commanding the last view of the sea behind, 
and the first view of the great plain in front, just w T here 
the glades of forest, the “ excellency of Carmel,” sink into 


1 I have described this spot in 
greater detail from its having been so 
rarely visited. Quaresmius heard of it, 
but could not get there (ii. 893). 
The place was also visited (but not 
described) by Mr. Williams and by 
Lieutenant Symonds. Since the above 
account was written, from my own re¬ 
collection, M. Van de Velde’s descrip¬ 
tion of the spot has been published ; 
aud from this I shall subjoin any addi¬ 
tional particulars in the notes. The 
villages of the range of Carmel have 
hitherto been only given in Zimmer- 
mann’s map. I have inserted them, 
according to our own observation, in 
the map of Esdraelon. 


2 The same name is applied to the 
scene of the Samaritan sacrifice on 
Gerizim. (De Saulcy, ii. 360.) It is also 
called “ El Mazar,” “ the tomb,” from a 
notion that the ruin is of that nature. 
—See Carne and Buckingham. 

3 Padre Carlo, who usually acts as 
host to the visitors to the convent, had 
been there, if at all, but once. He told 
M. Van de Velde that the place was near 
Mansureh, which is in the right direc¬ 
tion, but not the right spot. (Van de 
Velde, i. 296.) We were directed there 
by the cook of the convent, Daoud or 
David. 

4 One lower declivity only lies imme¬ 
diately belovv.it. 


PLAIN OP ESDRAELON. 


the usual barrenness of the hills and vales of Palestine. 
There, on the highest point of the mountain, may well 
have stood, on its sacred “ high place,” the altar of the 
Lord which Jezebel had cast down . 1 Close beneath, on 
a wide upland sweep, under the shade of ancient olives, 
and round a well of water, said to be perennial , 2 and 
which may therefore have escaped the general drought, 
and have been able to furnish water for the trenches 
round the altar—must have been ranged, on one side the 
king and people, with the eight hundred and fifty prophets 
of Baal and Astarte, and on the other side the solitary 
and commanding figure of the Prophet of the Lord. Full 
before them opened the whole plain of Esdraelon , 3 with 
Tabor and its kindred ranges in the distance ; on the rising 
ground, at the opening of its valley, the city of Jezreel, 
with Ahab’s palace and Jezebel’s temple distinctly visible ; 
in the nearer foreground, immediately under the base of 
the mountain, was clearly seen the winding stream of the 
Kishon, working its way through the narrow pass of the 
hills into the Bay of Acre . 4 Such a scene, with such 
recollections of the past, with such sights of the pre¬ 
sent, was indeed a fitting theatre for a conflict more 
momentous than any which their ancestors had fought 
in the plain below. This is not the place to enlarge 


1 The spot is marked by the ruin of 
a square stone building, amongst thick 
bushes of dwarf oak; which might be of 
any age, and in which, as stated above, 
the Druses come to sacrifice. M. Van 
de Velde (i. 321) describes it more par¬ 
ticularly as “ an oblong quadrangular 
building, of which the great door and 
both side walls are still partially stand¬ 
ing.” The large hewn stones suggest 
an older date than that of the Cru¬ 
sades. The place is probably the site 
of Vespasian’s sacrifice. (Tac. Hist, 
iii. 78.) The rocky fragments lying 
around, as Van de Velde well suggests 
(i. 423), would naturally afford the 
materials for the “ twelve stones ” of 
which the natural altar was built. 
1 Kings, xviii. 31, 32. 

2 So we were told by our guide from 
Asfyah. The exact spot is marked 

by an old olive tree, isolated from 

the olive grove which studs this lower 
plain, and which has been bought by 


the monks. M. Van de Velde was more 
fortunate in being able to examine this 
well for himself. He describes it (i. 325) 
as “a vaulted and very abundant foun¬ 
tain, built in the form of a tank with a 
few steps leading down to it, just as 
one finds elsewhere in the old wells or 
springs of the Jewish times.” 

3 It is the best view of the plain 
that we saw. 

4 1 Kings xviii. 40. On the descent 
from Carmel to the plain of Esdraelon 
a knoll was pointed out both to Mr. 
Williams and M. Van de Velde (i. 330) 
called “Tel Kishon,” or “Tel Sadi,” 
or “ Tel ITasis.” The latter name (“ hill 
of the Priests”) naturally suggests the 
memorial of the massacre of the priests 
of Baal. It is possible (as Schwarze sug¬ 
gests, 49—74) that the modern name 
of the Kishon, Nahar Mukatta (“river 
of slaughter”) may have the same 
derivation, though it may also refer to 
the bloody history of the whole plain. 


348 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


upon .the intense solemnity and significance of that con¬ 
flict which lasted on the mountain-height from morning 
till noon, from noon till the time of the evening sacrifice. 
It ended at last in the level plain below, where Elijah 
“ brought ” the defeated prophets “ down ” the steep 
sides of the mountain “ to the ‘ torrent' of the Kishon and 
slew them there.” 

The closing scene still remains. From the slaughter 
by the side of the Kishon, the King “ went up ” 1 at Elijah's 
bidding once again to the peaceful glades of Carmel, to 
join in the sacrificial feast. And Elijah too ascended to 
“ the top of the mountain,” and there, with his face upon 
the earth, remained wrapt in prayer, whilst his servant 
mounted to the highest point of all, whence there is a wide 
view of the blue reach of the Mediterranean Sea , 2 over the 
western shoulder of the ridge. The sun was now gone 
down, but the cloudless sky was lit up with the long 
bright glow which succeeds an eastern sunset. Seven 
times the servant climbed and looked, and seven times 
there was nothing; the sky was still clear, the sea was 
still calm. At last, out of the far horizon there rose a 
little cloud—the first that had for days and months passed 
across the heavens—and it grew in the deepening shades 
of evening, and at last the whole sky was overcast, and 
the forests of Carmel shook in the welcome sound of 
those mighty winds which in Eastern regions precede a 
coming tempest. Each from his separate height, the King 
and the Prophet descended. And the King mounted his 
chariot at the foot of the mountain, lest the long hoped- 
for rain should swell the torrent of the Kishon , 3 as in the 
days when it swept away the host of Sisera ; and “ the hand 
of the Lord was upon Elijah,'^md he girt his mantle round 
his loins, and, amidst the rushing storm with which the 
night closed in, “ ran before the chariot,” as the Bedouins 
of his native Gilead still run, with inexhaustible strength, 


1 1 Kings xviii. 41. 

2 This was also observed by M. Yan 
de Velde (i. 326). From the place where 

Elijah must have worshipped, the view 
of the sea is just intercepted by an 
adjacent height. That height, how¬ 
ever, may be ascended in a few mi¬ 


nutes, and a full view of the sea obtained 
from the top. 

3 M. Van de Velde (i. 327) considers 
the apprehension to have been, lest, the 
“ deep layer of dust, in the dry plain of 
Esdraelon, should have been converted 
into thick mud.” 


PLAIN OF ESDRAELON. 


349 


to the entrance of Jezreel, distant, though still visible, 
from the scene of his triumph. 

VI. Almost all the recollections of the plain of Esdraelon 
belong to the Old Testament. Yet we are now on the 
verge of the chief scenes of the New Testament, and the 
battle-field of Israel may have suggested to Him who 
must have crossed and re-crossed it on His many jour¬ 
neys to and from and through Galilee, those “ victorious 
deeds ” and “ heroic acts” which Milton has ascribed to 
His early meditations: 

“ One while 

To rescue Israel from the Roman yoke, 

Then to subdue and quell o’er all the earth 
Brute violence, and proud tyrannic power.” 

But it is the poet only, not the Evangelist, who has 
ventured to throw even this passing thought into that 
peaceful career, and the one incident which connects Him 
with the plain of Esdraelon is remarkable for the striking 
contrast which it presents to all the other associations of 
the region. 

On the northern slope of the rugged and barren ridge 
of Little Hermon, immediately west of Endor, which lies 
in a further recess of the same range, is the ruined village 
of Nain. No convent, no tradition, marks the spot. But, 
under these circumstances, the name is sufficient to 
guarantee its authenticity. One entrance alone it could 
have had—that which opens on the rough hilhside in its 
downward slope to the plain. It must have been in this 
steep descent, as, according to Eastern custom, they 
“ carried out the dead man,” that, “ nigh to the gate ” of 
the village, the bier was stopped, and the long procession 
of mourners stayed, and “ the young man delivered back” 
to his mother . 1 It is a spot which has no peculiarity of 
feature to fix it on the memory ; its situation is like l that of 
all the villages on this plain ; but, in the authenticity of 
its claims, and the narrow compass within which we have 
to look for the touching incident, it may rank amongst the 
most interesting points of the scenery of the Gospel 
narrative. 


Nain. 


1 Luke vii. 11—16. 




CHAPTER X. 


GALILEE. 

Matt. iv. 13—16. “And leaving Nazareth, he came and dwelt in 
Capernaum, which is upon the sea coast, in the borders of Zabulon and 
Nepthalim : that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by Esaias the 
prophet, saying, The land of Zabulon, and the land of Nepthalim, by the 
way of the sea, beyond Jordan, Galilee of the Gentiles ; the people which 
sat in darkness saw great light; and to them which sat in the region and 
shadow of death light is sprung up." 




Scenery of Northern Palestine—The Four Northern Tribes—Their wealth 
and their isolation—History in the New Testament. I. Nazareth — 
Its upland basin—Its seclusion—Sacred localities. II. Lake of Gen¬ 
nesareth : 1. Plain of Hattin and Mountain of the Beatitudes—Battle 
of Hattin ; 2. View of the Lake of Gennesareth ; 3. Later celebrity of 
Tiberias ; 4. Plain of Gennesareth—The Sea of Life—Traffic—Fertility 
—Fisheries—Population; 5. Scene of the Gospel Ministry—“Manu¬ 
facturing district ”—The Beach—The Desert—The Demoniacs and the 
Feeding of the Multitudes—The Villages of the Plain of Gennesareth 
—The Destruction of Capernaum. 


GALILEE. 


The broad depression of Esdraelon was the natural 
boundary and debateable land between the central and 
northern tribes of Palestine. On the north of the plain 
rises another group of mountains, as distinct in character 
and form, as they are separate in fact, from those of 
Samaria and Judaea, and thus, in like manner, distin¬ 
guished by the name of the chief tribe that dwelt among 
them, “the mountains of Naphthali,” as the more southern 
were “ the mountains of Ephraim ” and “ of Judah.” 1 
These hills are the western roots which Hermon thrusts 
out towards the sea, as it thrusts out the mountains of 
Bashan towards the Desert; and as such they partake 
of the jagged outline, of the varied vegetation, and of the 
high upland hollows which characterise in a greater or less 
degree the whole mass of the Lebanon range, in contrast 
to the monotonous aspect of the more southern scenery. 
So few travellers visit the interior of the Galilean 
mountains, that their beauty and richness is almost 
unknown. M. Van de Yelde who, contrary to the usual 
course, entered Palestine from the north, contrasts 
them favourably even with the rich valley of Samaria. 
“ It suffered, he says, “ in my case from my having 
entered the rocky mountains of Ephraim from the much 
finer and truly noble Galilee.” 2 And this beauty dis¬ 
tinguishes Galilee even from other parts of Lebanon. “ It 
struck me,” says the same traveller, “ that between Sidon 


Scenery of 

Northern 

Palestine. 


1 Joshua xx. 7. 


2 Vol. i. 374. 



354 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


The four 
northern 
tribes. 


and the Castle of Belfort the land was almost desti¬ 
tute of trees. The bare gray hills had impressed me 
with a sense of desolation, in spite of the many villages in 
that part of the land. In the district in which I have 
travelled—the Belad-Besharah—it was exactly the con¬ 
trary ; a scanty population, but a land rich in beauty and 
fertility ; a thick wood of oaks and other trees continued 
for a considerable way now over the heights, again through 
valleys, but everywhere characterised by a luxuriance of 
verdure by which you can recognise at once the fertility 
of Xaphthali’s inheritance and the demolition of the 
cities. For it was only here and there that we saw a 
village from afar, whereas, were the population large, this 
wood would have been greatly cleared.” 1 

This distinction of scenery, together with the natural 
separation of the hills of the north, from those which 
we have hitherto traversed, contains the main explanation 
of the history of the northern tribes. Asher has been 
already described in connection with the maritime plain of 
Phoenicia on the skirts of which his possessions hung. 
Of the almost servile character of Issachar enough has been 
said in describing the plain of Esdraelon. 2 But they must be 
briefly recalled here, as sharing the general fortunes of the 
northern group, of which the two chief tribes—Naphthali 
and Zebulun—occupied the mountain-tract, overlooking 
and commanding the territory of the two others,—of 
Asher on the west, and Issachar on the south. All the 
four alike kept aloof from the great historical movements 
of Israel. With the exceptions already noticed, when the 
immediate pressure of northern invaders rallied them, 
first round Barak, and then round Gideon, in the Plain of 
Esdraelon, they hardly ever appear in the events of the 
Jewish history. They were content with their rich 
mountain-valleys, and their maritime coast. Zebulun is 
to “ rejoice in his goings out.” Asher was to “ be blessed 
with children,” 3 “ acceptable to his brethren,” dipping his 
foot in the “ oil ” of his olive-groves, to be shod with “ the 

1 VoL L 170. a play on the word “Asher” blessed, 

* See Chapters VI. and IX. as in the analogous case of Judah and 

3 Dent, xxxiii. 24, 25. There is here " praise ” Gen. xlix r 8. 


GALILEE. 


355 


iron and brass ” 1 of Lebanon. Naphthali was to be like a 
“spreading ‘terebinth'” of the Lebanon forests 2 —“he 
putteth out goodly ‘ boughs.' ” He is to be “ satisfied with 
favour, and full with the blessing of the Lord .'' 3 They 
were to have also their openings to wealth and power by 
traffic on sea and land. “ Zebulun shall dwell at the 
‘ shore' of the sea—and shall be for a ‘ shore' of ships, 
and his border shall be unto Zidon.” 4 —“ Asher abode in 
his ‘ creeks'''—Zebulun and Issachar are to “ suck of the 
abundance of the seas, and of treasures hid in the sand .” 5 
Naphthali was “ to possess the ‘ sea on ' the south'' 6 —that 
is, the thoroughfare and traffic of the Sea of Galilee. 

All these points of contact with the surrounding 
nations tended to confirm their isolation from the rest of 
their countrymen. Ephraim and Judah were separated 
from the world by the Jordan-valley on one side, 
and the hostile Philistines on another ; but the northern 
tribes were in the direct highway of all the invaders 
from the north, in unbroken communication with the 
promiscuous races who have always occupied the heights 
of Lebanon, and in close and peaceful alliance with the 
most commercial and enterprising nation of the ancient 
world—the Phoenicians. From a very early period, their 
joint territory acquired the name which it bore under a 
slightly altered form in the distribution of the country 
into a Roman province—“ Galil, Galilah, Galilsea .” 7 It 
would seem to be merely another mode of expressing 
what is indicated by the word “Ciccar” in the case 


1 Iron is found in Lebanon. (Russeg- 
ger, i. 693; Volney, i. 233; Burckliardt, 
73.) Copper (the true translation of the 
word rendered brass) is nowhere now 
found, but its frequent mention in con¬ 
nection with the Tyrians justifies the 
allusion. 

2 Gen. xlix. 21. Mistranslated “ a hind 
let loose—he giveth goodly words.” 

Compare the “Terebinths of the Wan¬ 

derers,” wrongly translated “ the plains 

of Zaanaim,” near Kadesh Naphthali 

(Judges iv. 11), with the description of 
that very country by Van de Velde (ii. 

407), “a natural park of oaks and tere¬ 
binths.” Not knowing the meaning eith er 
of “ plains,” or “ Zaanaim,” he says, “ I 


have fruitlessly sought for the name.” 
He also speaks of the wooded basins— 
gardens “surrounded by dark-leaved 
oak-woods, whilst, here and there, thick 
tufted branches of the Carob might 
be seen rising aloft,”—“ a garden that 
has no end,”—bushes and trees “in¬ 
finite in number,” between Nazareth 
andSafed,ib.ii.407. Josephus (Bell. Jud. 
III. iii. 2) speaks of Galilee, as “planted 
thick with all kinds of trees.” 

3 Deut. xxxiii. 23. 4 Gen. xlix. 13. 

5 Deut. xxxiii. 19. See Chapters VI. 
and IX. 

6 So xxxiii. 23, may be translated. 

7 Josh. xx. 7, Heb. “Galil.” 2 Kings 
xv. 29, “Galilah.” 

A A 2 


Their 

wealth. 


Their 

isolation. 


356 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


Galilee in 
the New 
Testament. 

Nazaeeth. 


of the Jordan-valley—“ a circle" or “region"—and as 
such implies the separation of the district from the 
more regularly organised tribes or kingdoms of Samaria 
and Judaea. Gradually, too, it came to be regarded 
as the frontier between “ the Holy Land," and the 
external world,—“ Galilee of the Gentiles," 1 a situation 
curiously illustrating, if it did not suggest, the use of the 
word in ecclesiastical architecture—“ the Galilee " or 
Porch of the Cathedral of Palestine. Twenty of its cities 
were actually annexed by Solomon to the adjacent king¬ 
dom of Tyre; and formed with their territory the 
“ boundary " or “ offscouring " (“ Gebul" or “ Cabul" 2 ) of 
the two dominions—at a later time still known by the 
general name of “ ‘ the boundaries 9 (“coasts" or “ borders") 
of Tyre and Zidon." 3 In the first great transportation of 
the Jewish population, “Naphthali and Galilee" suffered 
the same fate as the trans-Jordanic tribes, before Ephraim 
or Judah had been molested. 4 In the time of the Christian 
era this original disadvantage of their position was still 
felt ; the “ speech of Galileans " “ bewrayed " them by its 
uncouth pronunciation ; 5 * * * and their distance from the seats 
of government and civilisation at Jerusalem and Caesarea 
gave them their character for turbulence or independence, 
according as it was viewed by their friends or their 
enemies. 

This isolation, which renders the history of Galilee an 
almost entire blank in the Old Testament, is the cause 
of its sudden glory in the New. 

I. It is one peculiarity of the Galilean hills, as dis¬ 
tinct from those of Ephraim or Judah, that they contain 
or sustain green basins of table-land just below their 
topmost ridges. Such are those which the traveller sees 
from the summit of Tabor, or further north from the 
slopes of Hermon. Such apparently was that ancient 

1 Isa. ix. 1; Matt. iv. 15. 1 Kings ix. 12, 13. For the difference 

2 Such seems to be the play of the of Galilean customs and dialect, see 

words of Hiram. “ And Hiram came out Lightfoot (ii. 77, 78), Renan’s Langues 

from Tyre to see the cities which Solo- Semitiques (i. 213). 

mon had given him; and he said, What 3 Matt. xv. 21; Mark vii. 24—31 

cities are these which thou hast given Luke vi. 17. 

me, my brother 1 And he called them 4 2 Kings xv. 29. 

the land of Cabul unto this day.” 5 Matt. xxvL 73. 


GALILEE. 


357 


sanctuary, the birth-place of Barak—known only by its 
significant name, and its selection as the northern city of 
refuge, corresponding to Shechem in central, and Hebron 
in southern Palestine ; the only historical name of those 
secluded tribes—Kedesh-Naphthali, “ the Holy Place of 
Naphthali." Such, too, although less elevated, was the 
Roman capital of Galilee—Dio-Caesarea, or Sepphoris , 1 
situated in the green plain of Buttauf in the hills imme¬ 
diately above Acre. 

But such above all is Nazareth. Fifteen gently 
rounded hills “seem as if they had met to form an 
enclosure ” for this peaceful basin—“ they 2 rise round it 
like the edge of a shell to guard it from intrusion. It is 
a rich and beautiful field" in the midst of these green 
hills 3 —abounding in gay flowers , 4 in fig-trees, small 
gardens, hedges of the prickly pear ; and the dense rich 
grass affords an abundant pasture. The village stands 
on the steep slope of the south-western side of the 
valle}^; its chief object, the great Franciscan Convent of 
the Annunciation with its white campanile and brown 
enclosure . 5 

From the crest of the hills which thus screen it, espe¬ 
cially from that called “ Nebi-Said," or “Ismail," on the 
western side, is one of the most striking views in Pales¬ 
tine—Tabor with its rounded dome, on the north-east, 
—Hermon’s white top in the distant north, Carmel 
and the Mediterranean Sea to the west; a conjunction 
of those three famous mountains probably unique in the 
views of Palestine ;—and in the nearer prospect, the 
uplands in which Nazareth itself stands ; its own circular 
basin behind it; on the west, enclosed by similar hills, 


1 Josephus Ant. xviii. ii. 1. The 
fullest account of Sepphorieh, and of 
the remains of its magnificent church, 
is given by Dr. Clarke, iv. 134. The 
church was built by Josephus, Count 
of Tiberias, a.d. 330. (Epiph. Hser. 
ii. 1.) 

2 This account is partly from my own 
recollections, partly in the words of 
Dr. Richardson, whose description of 
Nazareth is unusually faithful and 
vivid. (See Modern Traveller, p. 304.) 

3 Richardson speaks of them as 


barren, and Quaresmius (ii. 818), as bar¬ 
ren, white, chalky hills, and says the town 
thence derives its name of Medina 
Abiad, “the white city.” This confirms 
Schwarze’s remark (p. 178), who says 
that he has “ ascertained from ancient 
documents that the town of Nazareth 
was called the White Town”—“ Laban.” 

4 Hence possibly its name, according 
to the old interpretation of it, as 
“ flowery.” (See von Raumer, Palastiua, 
p. 119.) 

5 See Chapter XIV. 


Its upland 
basin, 


358 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


and its 
seclusion. 


The Spring 
of the An¬ 
nunciation. 


overhanging the plain of Acre, lies the town of Sepphorieh, 
just noticed as the Roman capital, and brought into close, 
and as far as its situation is concerned, not improbable 
connection with Nazareth, as the traditional residence 
of the Virgin's parents. On the south, and south-east, 
lies the broad plain of Esdraelon, overhung by the 
high pyramidal hill, which, as the highest point of 
the Nazareth range, and thus the most conspicuous 
to travellers approaching from the plain, has received, 
though without any historical ground, the name of the 
“ Mount of Precipitation." These are the natural features 
which for nearly thirty years met the almost daily view of 
Him who “ increased in wisdom and stature ” within this 
beautiful seclusion. It is the seclusion which constitutes 
its peculiarity and its fitness for these scenes of the Gospel 
history. Unknown and unnamed in the Old Testament, 
Nazareth first appears as the retired abode of the humble 
carpenter. Its separation from the busy world may be the 
ground, as it certainly is an illustration, of the Evangelist's 
play on the word “ He shall be called a Nazarene." Its wild 
character high up in the Galilean hills may account both 
for the roughness of its population, unable to appreciate 
their own Prophet, and for the evil reputation which 
it had acquired even in the neighbouring villages, one 
of whose inhabitants, Nathaniel of Cana, said : “ Can any 
good thing come out of Nazareth 1" There, secured within 
the natural barrier of the hills, was passed that youth, of 
which the most remarkable characteristic is its absolute 
obscurity; and thence came the name of Nazakene, 
used of old by the Jews, and used still by Mussulmans, as 
the appellation of that despised sect which has now 
embraced the civilised world. 

It was not to be expected that any local reminiscences 
should be preserved of a period so studiously, as it would 
appear, withdrawn from our knowledge. Two natural 
features, however, may still be identified, connected—the 
one by tradition, the other by the Gospel narrative, with 
the events which have made Nazareth immortal. The 
first is the spring or well in the green open space, 1 at the 

1 For this and the other “ Holy Places ” of Nazareth see Chap. XIV. 


GALILEE. 


359 


north-west extremity of the town, a spot well known as 
the general encampment of such travellers as do not take 
up their quarters in the Franciscan convent. It is 
probably this well, which must always have been fre¬ 
quented, as it is now, by the women of Nazareth, that in 
the earliest local traditions of Palestine figured as the 
scene of the Angelic Salutation to Mary, as she, after the 
manner of her countrywomen, went thither to draw water. 
The tradition may be groundless, but there can be little 
question that the locality to which it is attached exists, 
and that it must have existed at the time of the alleged 
scene. The second is indicated in the Gospel history by 
one of those slight touches which serve as a testimony 
to the truth of the description, by nearly approaching 
but yet not crossing the verge of inaccuracy. “ They 
rose/’ it is said of the infuriated inhabitants, “ and cast 
him out of the city, and brought him to £ a brow of the 
mountain ' (Ico? o<£puos tov opovs) on which the city was built, 
SO as to c Cast him down the cliff' ” (coo-re KaraKpr]pi.viaaL 
avrbv). Most readers probably from these words imagine 
a town built on the summit of a mountain, from which 
summit the intended precipitation was to take place. 
This, as I have said, is not the situation of Nazareth. 
Yet, its position is still in accordance with the narrative. 
It is built “ upon,” that is, on the side of “ a mountain,” 
but the “ brow ” is not beneath but over the town, and 
such a cliff* (kpwvos) as is here implied, is to be found, 
as all modern travellers describe, in the abrupt face of 
the limestone rock, about thirty or forty feet high, over¬ 
hanging the Maronite convent at the south-west cover of 
the town. 

It is needless to dwell in detail on the other lesser 
scenes of our Lord's ministrations in the neighbourhood of 
his early home. Nain, at two or three hours' distance, in 
the Plain of Esdraelon, has been already mentioned. 1 The 
“ parts,” or “ borders ” of Tyre and Sidon are too indefinite 
to be dwelt upon. The claims of Cana 2 are almost equally 

1 See Chapter IX. ii. 1, 11; and iv. 46, that Cana was at 

2 Ewald. (Geschichte, vol. v. 147), that time the actual residence of the 
infers—not without reason—from John Holy Family. 


The Rock 
of the Pre¬ 
cipitation. 


360 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


The Lake 

op GrENNE- 
SARETH. 


Plain of 
Hattin. 


Mount of 
.the Beati¬ 
tudes. 


balanced between the two modern villages of that name 
—the one situated at some distance in the corner of the 
basin of Sepphorieh, the other nearer in an upland village 
to the east of Nazareth. 

II. But the most important district of Galilee has not 
yet been mentioned. 

1. And first, we must descend from the hills of Galilee 
once more into the Plain of Esdraelon, and leaving Tabor 
on the right, turn off into a wild lesser upland plain—now 
called the Ard-el-Hamma, which is an excrescence of the 
great plain on the north-west, as the plain of Acre is on 
the south-west. This undulating table-land, which skirts 
the hills of Galilee on the east, is broken by a long low 
ridge rising at its northern extremity into a square 
shaped hill with two tops, which give it the modern name 
of “ the Horns of Hattin,” Hattin being the village on the 
ridge at its base. This mountain or hill—for it only 
rises sixty feet above the plain—is that known to pilgrims 
as the Mount of the Beatitudes—the supposed scene of the 
“ Sermon on the Mount.” The tradition cannot lay claim 
to any early date; it was in all probability suggested first 
to the Crusaders by its remarkable situation. But that 
situation so strikingly coincides with the intimations of 
the Gospel narrative, as almost to force the inference that 
in this instance the eye of those who selected the spot was 
for once rightly guided. It is the only height seen in 
this direction from the shores of the Lake of Gennesareth. 
The plain on which it stands is easily accessible from the 
lake, and from that plain to the summit is but a few 
minutes' walk. The platform at the top is evidently 
suitable for the collection of a multitude, and corresponds 
precisely to the ‘ level place,' 1 ( tottov irebLvov) to which He 
would “ come down” as from one of its higher horns to 
address the people. Its situation is central both to the 
peasants of the Galilean hills, and the fishermen of the 
Galilean lake, between which it stands, and would 
therefore be a natural resort both to “ Jesus, and His 
disciples” 2 when they retired for solitude from the 
shores of the sea, and also to the crowds who assembled 

1 Lukevi. 17, mistranslated “plain.” 2 Matt. iv. 25—v. 1. 


GALILEE. 


361 


‘‘from Galilee, from Decapolis, from Jerusalem, from 
Judaea, and from beyond Jordan.” None of the other 
mountains in the neighbourhood could answer equally 
well to this description, inasmuch as they are merged 
into the uniform barrier of hills round the lake : whereas 
this stands separate—“ the mountain,” 1 which alone could 
lay claim to a distinct name, with the exception of the 
one height of Tabor, which is too distant to answer the 
requirements. 

The Crusaders gave it its present title—and it has 
another fatal association with their history, one of the 
few vivid recollections which rival the permanent interest 
of these Galilean localities. On that long dry ridge, 
under the burning midsummer sun of Syria, on the 
5th of July, 1187, was encamped the Christian host, in 
the final crisis of the Crusades—and round the base of 
the hill on every side was the victorious army of Saladin 
ready for the attack. The attack was made ; and under 
circumstances somewhat similar to those of the rout on 
Mount Gilboa, the Christian entrenchments on the hill 
were stormed, and one more was added to the long list of 
the battles of the Plain of Esdraelon—the last struggle of 
the Crusaders, in which all was staked in the presence of 
the holiest scenes of Christianity, and all miserably lost. 2 

2. From the plain and from the mountain, thus doubly 
celebrated, the traveller descends to the Sea of Galilee. 
The first glimpse of its waters he will have had from the 
top of Tabor; they also lie opened out wide before him 
from the top of the Mount of Beatitudes. But the first 
full view, as it is approached by the regular road, is on 
the descent through the hills whose summits form the 
boundary of the plain of Hattin, and which on the 
other side slope abruptly down to the lake itself, as it lies 
a thousand feet below the level of the country. It is a 
moment, if any, when recollections of the past disarm any 
attempts to criticise the details of the actual scene. Yet, 
whether it be tame and poor, as some travellers say, or 

1 The use of the same word (rb opos) 2 The battle is sufficiently described 
in Matt. xv. 29, throws some doubt on in Robinson (vol. iii. pp. 241—248). 
this inference. 


Battle of 
Hattin. 


View of 
the lake. 


362 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


eminently beautiful, as others, there is no doubt that it has a 
character of its own which shall here be, if possible, 
described. It is about thirteen miles long, and in its 
broadest parts six miles wide, that is, about the same 
length as our own Winandermere, but of a considerably 
greater breadth. In the clearness of the eastern atmos¬ 
phere, it looks much smaller than it is. From no 
point on the western side can it be seen completely from 
end to end; the promontory under which Tiberias stands 
cutting off the southern, as the promontory over the plain 
of Gennesareth, the northern extremity ; so that the form 
which it presents is generally that of an oval. But 
what makes it unlike any of our English lakes is the 
deep depression, which gives it something of the strange, 
unnatural character that belongs in a still greater degree 
to the Dead Sea and in some degree to all lakes of 
volcanic 1 origin, such as those of Alba, Nemi, and Avernus. 
The hills on the eastern side partake of the horizontal 
outline which belongs to the whole eastern barrier of 
the Jordan-valley. But the western mountains, especially 
those at the northern end, are varied in form, and 
this variety is increased when they are seen mingled 
with the long arch of Tabor, with the horned platform 
of Hattin, and with the jagged summits of Safed, standing 
out from the offshoots of Lebanon. Their appearance, 
even in the view from the west, where alone they are 
usually seen, presents a complication of striking features, 
such as is hardly elsewhere visible in Palestine ; and this 
must be still more the case, in the aspect 2 which they 
present to a spectator on the opposite eastern shore, now 
for the most part entirely unfrequented. 

As we descend through the rocky walls which encompass 
it, its peculiar situation makes itself more strongly felt. 
Another climate begins. In the summer or late spring, 
all travellers speak of the oppressive heat, as they sink 
below the bracing atmosphere of the hills of Galilee into 
the deep basin of the Jordan lake. In the early spring 3 
it is not so : but even then the natural features at once 

* See Ritter; Jordan, vol. i. 296. 3 I was there on the 4th and 5th of 

2 See Lord Lindsay’s Letters, ii. p. 92. April. 


GALILEE. 


363 


indicate that we are approaching the temperature of 
Jericho and the Dead Sea. The “Nabk,” or thorn-tree, 
never seen in the higher plains, here breaks out along the 
hill-sides in thick jungles ; and down on the beach the 
first object that catches the eye is Tiberias with its line of 
palms. Beyond rises the white dome that covers the warm 
springs, which send out their steaming waters over the 
beach into the lake,—an indication of that volcanic agency 
that has from time to time overthrown the cities in this 
neighbourhood, Tiberias and Safed, with a destruction for 
the time almost as terrible, though not as complete, as 
that which visited the older cities of the south. Along the 
edge of this secluded basin, runs the whole way round 
from north to south a level beach ; at the southern end 
roughly strewn with the black and white stones peculiar 
to this district, 1 and also connected with its volcanic 
structure ; but the central or northern part, formed of 
smooth sand, or of a texture of shells and pebbles so 
minute as to resemble sand, like the substance of the 
beach on the Gulf of 'Akabah. Shrubs, too, of the 
tropical thorn, fringe the greater part of the line of shore, 
mingled here and there with the bright pink colours of the 
oleander, 

“ All thro’ the summer night, 

Those blossoms red and bright. 

Spread their soft breasts—” 2 

long before they are in flower in the valleys of the higher 
country. On this beach, which can be discerned running 
like a white line all round the lake, the hills plant their 
dark base, descending nowhere precipitously, but almost 
everywhere presenting an alternation of soft grassy slopes 
and rocky cliffs, occasionally broken away so as to 
exhibit the red and gray colours so familiar in the lime¬ 
stone of Greece. 

It is only, as its two extremities are approached, that 
the parent river, and its connection with the lake, can be 
clearly discerned. At each end, the western hills fall 

1 See Chapter II. passage “ rhododendrons ” is a mistake 

2 Keble’s Christian Year — Third for “ oleanders.” 

Sunday in Advent. In the note to that 


364 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


J ewish 
History of 
Tiberias. 


away in height, and recede from the shore. From these 
hills, on the south, the green line of vegetation appears 
distinctly, through which the Jordan issues from the lake 
through its wide open valley, descending towards the Dead 
Sea. In like manner, from the heights at the head of 
the lake, the entrance of the river is marked by the rich 
green plain of Batihah, stretching close up to the high 
wall of the eastern range. 1 Two isolated palms stand 
on the brink of the shore, as if to welcome its rushing 
waters. 2 


3. These are the general features of the most sacred sheet 
of water that this earth contains. Before we descend to its 
more special localities, we must turn to its general history. 
Like Olivet at Jerusalem, like Nazareth, like Galilee gene¬ 
rally, it is connected with no cycle of sacred associations but 
one, and that the holiest of all. In the generation indeed 
immediately succeeding the Christian era, a few incidents 
from the war of Vespasian are connected with the history 
of the lake ; and in the next generation yet again there was 
established on its shores the great Jewish university which 
rendered Tiberias for three centuries the metropolis of the 
race. 3 Tiberias became the seat of the Patriarch, who exer¬ 
cised an almost Papal sway over the wide extent to which 
his exiled countrymen had been scattered. The ruins of 
the ancient city, the numerous tombs in the vicinity, one of 
which contains the remains of the great Maimonides, and 
the Jewish population, whose peculiar manners and features 
at once arrest the traveller’s attention as he passes through 
the streets of the modern town,—attest the reverence 


in which it has been held by the distant settlements, 
whence Jews have for centuries come to lay their bones 


1 Pococke is the only traveller who 
has published any account of the Jordan 
between the Lakes of Merom and 
Gennesareth. But Mr. Williams has 
ascended it, and his accoiint agrees with 
Pococke’s in representing the great fall 
as commencing below Jacob’s Bridge, 
after which it is a perpetual cascade, 
till within three miies of its entrance 
into the Sea of Galilee. The plain of 
Batihah is described by Robinson, 
B. R. iii. 302. 

2 I have described the lake as I saw 


it from these various points. The 
entrance and exit of the Jordan I saw 
only (as here indicated) from a distance. 
Keble’s lines “ on the Seventh Sunday 
after Trinity ” are faithful on the whole, 
though “ Tabor’s lonely peak ” is (see 
Chapter IX.), an inaccurate expression, 
and the “ mountains terraced high with 
mossy stone,” is an image belonging to 
the moist atmosphere of the West, not 
to the bare landscape of the East. 

3 See Lightfoot, ii. 26, 27; Milman’s 
Hist, of the Jews, iii. 127. 


GALILEE. 


365 


in the neighbourhood. Tiberias, and Safed,—which over¬ 
looks the lake from its neighbouring heights,—are the two 
Holy Cities of the north, which, in the eyes of modern 
Judaism, almost rival the two Holy Cities of the south, 
Jerusalem and Hebron. Yet even this sanctity, by a 
strange coincidence or perversion of facts, has grown out 
of the series of events which alone give the lake its real 
fame. As at Jerusalem, the Rabbinical belief associated 
the Shechinah with Olivet, so here the selection of Safed 
and Tiberias as the “ Holy Places ” of the last efforts 
of Judaism, was dictated by the thought that they were 
both within sight of the lake from whose waters the 
Messiah would rise ; that at Tiberias he would land, and 
at Safed establish his throne. “ I have created seven seas, 
saith the Lord,” (such was the Rabbinical belief,) “but 
out of them all I have chosen none but the Sea of 
Gennesareth.” 1 

4. In the Old Testament only its name occurs as “ Chin- 
nereth,” 2 or “the sea of Chinnereth,” 3 either from a town 4 
on its banks, or, more probably, from its oval shape, the 
“ Lake of the Harp,” or the “ Lake of the Falls,” from the 
cascades in which the Jordan enters and leaves it. Its 
“ warm springs,” too, were already specified under the 
name of “ Hammath.” 5 But it was not altogether unknown 
for the purposes of traffic. Situated in the midst of the 
Jordan-valley, on the great thoroughfare from Babylon 
and Damascus into Palestine, its waters seem to have 
answered a purpose like that served by the Lake of 
Lucerne between Italy and Germany. Hence the value 
to Naphthali of c the sea of the south/ 6 to compensate for 
“ the sea of the west ” enjoyed by the kindred tribes of 
Asher, Issachar, and Zebulun ; hence “ the way of the 
sea” “beyond Jordan” of “Zebulun and Naphthali.” 7 
Along its banks, as we have already seen, the depth of its 
situation produced a tropical vegetation unknown in the 

1 Lightfoot, ii. 6. See a striking 3 Numb, xxxiv. 11; Josh. xii. 3; 

scene described in Captain Allen’s xiii. 27. 4 Josh. xix. 35. 

Dead Sea, vol. i. p. 345, in reference 5 Josh. xix. 35, afterwards known as 
to this belief. “Emmaus.” See Joseph. Ant. XVIII. ii. 

2 Deut. iii. 17; Josh, xi.2; 1 Kings 3, and Reland, p. 302. 6 Deut. xxxiii. 23. 

xv . 20. 7 I sa * 1 > Matt. iv. 15. 


Traffic of 
the Lake. 





366 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


Fertility 
of its 
shores. 


hills above ; and this vegetation was increased by the 
beautiful springs, which, characteristic of the whole Valley 
of the Jordan, are unusually numerous and copious along 
the western shore of this lake, scattering verdure and 
fertility along their short course. This fertility, every where 
apparent more or less in the thin strip of land which 
intervenes between the mountains and the lake, reaches 
its highest pitch in the one spot on the shore, where the 
mountains, suddenly receding inland, leave an open and 
level plain of five miles wide, and six or seven miles long. 
This plain is “ the land of Gennesareth,” identified by its 
remarkable agreement with the graphic though somewhat 
exaggerated description of Josephus of “the country of 
Gennesar.” No less than four springs pour forth their 
almost full-grown rivers through the plain ; the richness 
of the soil displays itself in magnificent cornfields ; whilst 
along the shore rises a thick jungle of thorn and oleander, 
abounding in birds of brilliant colours and various forms ; 
the whole producing an impression such as to the traveller 
of modern days recalls instantly the Valley of the Nile,— 
such as not unnaturally suggested the same notion to the 
Jews of old, who looked on one of these fertilising streams 
as a vein of the Nile, abounding even in the same fish, and 
producing the same effects on its banks . 1 This “ Paradise” 
or “ garden ” of Northern Palestine (so we may best inter¬ 
pret the meaning of its name 2 ) is doubtless the exact 
likeness of what the “ Vale of Siddim ” was, where stood 
the five cities when Lot saw that it was “well watered 
everywhere before the Lord destroyed Sodom and 
Gomorrah, even as the garden of the Lord, like the land 

°f Egypt ” 3 

This contrast with the present aspect of its sister lake 
on the south gives to the natural features of the Sea 
of Galilee a peculiar interest. If the southern lake is the 
Sea of Death, the northern is emphatically the Sea of Life . 4 
And it is still by nature, what it was at the time of the 

1 Josephus, Bell. Jud. III. x. 8. Rabbis say, to the Princes of Naphthali. 

2 Gennesar. The first part of the (Lightfoot, ii. 71.) 3 Gen. xiii. 10. 

word is evidently, Gani, “gardens,” 4 The contrast of the two seas is 
the latter, Sar , may be “Prince,” the well given in Schwarze, 46, and shortly 
“ Gardens of Princes,” alluding, as the in Josephus, Bell. Jud. IV. viii. 2. 


GALILEE. 


367 


Christian era by art also. With that turn for magni- ynias of 
ficent buildings which so distinguished his family, and theHerods - 
which perhaps had been encouraged in himself by the sight 
of the splendid Roman villas along the shores of the 
Lucrine lake, where most of his own early life had been 
spent, the younger Herod and his brother Philip built two 
stately cities, called after the names of the Emperor 
Tiberius and the Princess Julia, daughter of Augustus. 

The first was near the warm springs at the southern ex¬ 
tremity, and the other by the entrance of the Jordan at 
the northern extremity. But these, though probably the 
most conspicuous, and giving to the lake the beauty which 
we are accustomed to consider as peculiar to the shores of 
Como and Lugano, were not the chief centre of activity. 

This, doubtless, was to be found in the little plain, just 
described, crowded with towns and villages. Nor was 
the life confined to the land. The lake, probably from 
the numerous streams, including the Jordan itself, which 
discharge their produce into its waters, abounds in fish of 
all kinds, which there increase and multiply, as certainly 
as in the Salt Sea they are cast up dead upon the 
shore. From the earliest 1 times—so said the Rabbinical 
legends—the lake had been so renowned in this respect, 
that one of the ten fundamental laws laid down by Fisheries. 
Joshua on the division of the country was, that any one 
might fish with a hook in the Sea of Galilee, so that they 
did not interfere with the free passage of boats. Two of 
the villages on the banks derived their name from their 
fisheries ; 2 and all of them sent forth their fishermen by 
hundreds over the lake; and when we add the crowd of 
ship-builders, the many boats of traffic, pleasure, and 
passage, we see that the whole basin must have been a 
focus of life and energy: the surface of the lake constantly 
dotted with the white sails of vessels, flying before the 
mountain gusts, as the beach sparkled with the houses and 
palaces, the synagogues and the temples of the Jewish or 
Roman inhabitants. 

5. It was to these scenes that He, whom His fellow- 

1 See Bava Cama, in the Babylonian 2 The western and eastern BethsaiJa 
Gemara, apud Reland, p. 260. (“house of fish”). 







368 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


Scene of 
the Gospel 
Ministry. 


“Manu¬ 

facturing 

district.” 


townsmen at Nazareth rejected, came. He “came 
down ” 1 from the high country of Galilee, where he had 
hitherto dwelt; and from henceforth made his permanent 
home in the deep retreat of the Sea of Galilee. What 
has been already said at once gives the reason. It was no 
retired mountain-lake by whose shore he took up his 
abode, such as might have attracted the Eastern sage or 
Western hermit. It was to the Roman Palestine almost 
what the manufacturing districts are to England. No 
where, except in the capital itself, could He have found 
such a sphere for His works and words of mercy; from 
no other centre could “ His fame ” have so gone through¬ 
out all Syria; 2 no where else could He have so drawn round 
Him the vast multitudes who hung on His lips “ from 
Galilee, from Decapolis, from Judsea, and from beyond 
Jordan/’ 3 and ran “ through that whole region round 
about/’ “ carrying about in beds” through its narrow but 
crowded plain “ those that were sick, wherever they heard 
he was;” and “whithersoever he entered,” into any of 
the numerous “ villages or cities,” there “ they laid the 
sick in the market-places,” 4 .... “ many coming and 
going, so that He had not time so much as to eat.” 5 
In that busy stir of life 6 were the natural elements, 
out of which His future disciples were to be formed. 
Far removed from the capital, mingled, as we have 
seen, with the Gentile races of Lebanon and Arabia,— 
the dwellers by the Sea of Galilee were free from most 
of the strong prejudices which in the south of Palestine 
raised a bar to His reception. “The people” 7 in “the 
land of Zebulun and Nephthalim, by the way of the sea 
beyond Jordan, Galilee of the Gentiles,” had “sat in 
darkness,” but from that very cause “they saw” more 
clearly “ the great light ” when it came : “ to them which 
sat in the region and the shadow of death,” for that very 
reason “ light sprang up ” the more readily. He came to 
“preach the Gospel to the poor,” to “the weary and 

1 KcmpV.flej', Luke iv. 31; John iv. 47, 6 For the immense population of 

51. Galilee, see Josephus, Bell. Jud. III. 

2 Matt. iv. 24. 3 Matt. iv. 25. iii. 2. “The least village,” he says, doubt- 

4 tV TTfplxoopov iKelvrju . . . less not without his usual exaggeration 

aypovs . . . ay opals. Mark vi. 55, 56. “ contained 15,000 inhabitants.” 

5 Mark vi. 31. 7 Matt. iv. 15, 16. 


GALILEE. 


869 


heavy laden ”—to “ seek and to save that which was 
lost. ,; Where could He find work so readily as in the 
ceaseless toil and turmoil of these teeming villages and 
busy waters \ The heathen or half-heathen “ publicans ” 
or tax-gatherers would be there, sitting by the lake side 
“at the receipt of custom” The “women who were 
sinners ” would there have come, either from the neigh¬ 
bouring Gentile cities, or corrupted by the license of 
Gentile manners. The Roman soldiers would there be 
found quartered with their slaves, 1 to be near the palaces 
of the Herodian princes, or to repress the turbulence of 
the Galilean peasantry. And the hardy boatmen, filled 
with the faithful and grateful spirit 2 by which that peasan¬ 
try was always distinguished, would supply the energy 
and docility which He needed for His followers. The 
copious fisheries of the lake now assumed a new interest. 
The two boats by the beach—Simon and Andrew casting 
their nets into the water—James and John on the shore 
washing and mending their nets—the “toiling all the 
night and catching nothing ”—“ the great multitude of 
fishes so that the net brake ” 3 —Philip, Andrew, and 
Simon from “ Bethsaida ” the “ House of Fisheries ” 4 — 
the “ casting a hook for the first fish that cometh 
up ”—the “ net cast into the sea, and gathering of every 
kind ” 5 —all these are images which could occur nowhere 
else in Palestine but on this one spot, and which from 
that one spot have now passed into the religious language 
of the civilised world, and in their remotest applications, 
or even misapplications, have converted the nations and 
shaken the thrones of Europe. 

These, doubtless, furnish the main reasons why the sea 
of Galilee and the plain of Gennesareth became the home 
of Christ. But the lesser features of its history and scenery 
agree no less with the Gospel narrative. I have said that, 
whilst the lake is almost completely surrounded by moun¬ 
tains, those mountains never come down into the water, 
but always have a beach of greater or less extent along 

1 Luke vii. 2. 

2 Joseph. Vita c. 42, 43, 50. 

3 Luke v. 2—10. 


4 John i. 44. , 

5 Matt. xiii. 47; xvii. 27. 


370 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


The beach 
of the Lake. 


) 


the water edge. It is on this smooth margin, “ beside 
the lake of Gennesareth, 77 that we must imagine Jesus 
“ standing, 77 looking out on the waters of the lake, then 
stepping into one of the “ two ‘ boats 7 77 that “ stood 77 on 
its gradual slope, and bidding Peter launch out “into 
the deep. 771 It is along this same level shore (probably 
that of the plain of Gennesareth),—which then perhaps was 
less encumbered than at present with the thick jungle 
which lines its whole length—that the multitude gathered 
“ by the sea 2 on the land, 57 whilst He was stepping into 
“ the boat. 77 3 From the boat of passage, that lay close by 
for the purpose, He addressed to them His teaching in 
parables ; and they stood “ on the 4 beach. 7 77 4 On the same 
‘beach,’ 5 whether of the delicate texture of sand and 
shells which lines the northern shores, or the rougher 
shingle that distinguishes the rest, the scene took place 
described in the last chapter of the Gospel according 
to St. John. There was the little crew in their boat on 
the waters of the lake. The early dawn had broken, 6 
revealing, as it does, every cleft and broken cliff in distinct 
proportions all down the rocky sides of its enclosing hills. 
“ On the beach 77 stood the solitary figure ; and through 
the stillness of the morning air, not yet disturbed by 
the waking hum of the surrounding villages, came the 
gentle voice calling, after the manner of the East, “ chil¬ 
dren, 7 ’ and bidding them cast their wide nets into the lake 
once more. Then came the sudden rush of fish into the 
net, “ so that they were not able to draw it, 77 7 and the 
recognition of the Lord. Peter, resuming the dress which, 
like eastern boatmen, he had thrown off whilst struggling 
with the net, leaped into the lake, and dashed through 
the shallow water to the shore, whilst his companions in 
the lesser boat, 8 in which alone they could approach the 
beach, dragged the net, and Peter, as he “ went up ” 9 


1 Luke v. 1, 2, 4. 2 Mark iv. 1. 

3 els rb ttXoiov. Matt. xiii. 1. 

4 ini rbv alyiaXbv. Ibid. 2. 

fi e is rbv cuyiaXbv. John xxi. iv. 

6 irpwl'as yevo/xevrjs. Ibid. 

7 John xxi. 6. 

8 John xxi. 8. rep irXoiapicp , as dis¬ 
tinguished from rb ttXoiov. Yet perhaps 


this can hardly be insisted on. See 
John vi. 22, where the word TrXoiapiov 
is undoubtedly applied to the same 
vessel which, in verses 17, 19, 21, is 
called ttXoTov. It is the tendency of 
modern Greek to substitute the di¬ 
minutives everywhere. 

9 ave/Sr]. John xxi. 11. 



GALILEE. 


371 


out of the water, took it from their hands, and spread it on 
the level shore. 

Again, a remarkable feature of the lake must always 
have been the concentration of varied life and activity 
in a basin so closely surrounded with desert solitudes. 
The plain of Gennesareth, enjoying its tropical climate, 
even now presents a striking contrast to the bare 
hills thinly dotted here and there with scanty grass, 
which embrace it. In ancient times, this near contrast of 
Life and Death, population and solitude, must have been 
brought to its highest pitch. It was those “ desert places,” 
thus close at hand, on the table-lands, or in the ravines 
of the eastern and western ranges which seem to be classed 
under the common name of “ the mountain,” that gave the 
opportunities of retirement for rest or prayer. “ Rising 
up early in the morning while it was yet dark,” or 
“ passing over to the other side in a boat,” He sought 
those solitudes, sometimes alone, sometimes with His 
disciples. The lake in this double aspect is thus a reflex 
of that union of energy and rest, of active labour and of 
deep devotion, which is the essence of Christianity, 
as it was of the life of Him in whom that union was 
first taught and shown. 

This brings us to the consideration of the more par¬ 
ticular scenes of which traces may be found. To the 
southern extremity there is no record that our Lord ever 
went. Tiberias, its chief city, was so nearly a Roman 
colony, its site, on the remains of an ancient burial-ground, 
so offensive to Jewish scruples, 1 that He who was sent 
to the lost sheep of the house of Israel would probably 
not have spent His labour in its precincts. 

To the eastern side, however, several visits are described, 
two, it may be three, of such importance as to require 
special notice. The eastern shores of the lake have been 
so slightly visited and described, that any comparison of 
their features with the history must necessarily be pre¬ 
carious. Yet one general characteristic of that shore, as 
compared with the western side, has been indicated, which 
was probably the case in ancient times, though in a less 

1 Jos. Ant. XVIII. ii. 3. 

B B 2 




372 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


degree than at present—namely, its desert character. 
The desert. Partly this arises from its nearer exposure to the Bedouin 
tribes ; partly from its less abundance of springs and 
streams. There is no recess in the eastern hills ; no towns 
along its hanks corresponding to those in the Plain of 
Gennesareth. Thus this wilder region became a natural 
refuge from the active life of the western shores. It was 
“ when He saw great multitudes about Him ” that “ He 
gave commandment to depart unto the other side ; ,n and 
again He said, “ Come ye yourselves apart into a desert 
place, and rest awhile; for there were many coming and 
going, and they had no leisure so much as to eat.” 2 The 
first of these occasions was in the morning. His imme¬ 
diate followers sent away the multitude, and took him 
even as He was in “ the boat,” 3 A crowd of lesser 
vessels were also on the lake, and there occurred one of 
those incidents to which every mountain-lake more or less, 
and the Sea of Galilee from its situation especially, is 
subject. Through one of the deep ravines, which have 
been described as breaking through the hills to the shore, 
The storm, there “ came down a storm of wind” 4 on the lake. In 
a moment the still waters were roused as by ‘ an earth¬ 
quake/ 5 and the waves filled the boat; in a moment, 
when “ He rebuked the wind,” “ there was a great calm.” 6 
Almost every feature 7 in the story which follows can 
be traced to the locality. The demoniac described by 
St. Mark and St. Luke, is indeed such as might have 
been found on either side of the lake. He is the exact 
counterpart of the wild maniac described by Epiphanius, 
niacs. em ° a t Tiberias, 8 who, like the Gadarene demoniac, refused all 
clothing, and wandered about the city. But the particulars 
are such as specially suit one spot only on the eastern 
side, the central ravine of the Wady Feik nearly opposite 
Tiberias. The “ tombs,” from which the demoniac issued 
the moment that he saw the boat touch the shore, would 


1 Matt. viii. 18. 

2 Mark vi. 31. 
Mark iv. 36. 


7 Here I follow Lord Lindsay’s 
account implicitly. He is the only 
traveller who has carefully described 
the eastern shores. I saw these places 
only with difficulty from the west. 

8 Adv. Hffir. i. 10 



6 <rei<r/ibs. Matt. viii. 24. 
6 Mark. iv. 39. 


Adv. Haer. i. 10. 



GALILEE. 


373 


be those hewn in the rock on the approach to the ancient 
city, whether of Gamala 1 or Hippos, which still crowns a 
height at the top of the ravine. They are not (as is 
the case with the tombs of Gadara near the south-eastern 
extremity of the lake), behind, but in front, of the 
town, on the side of the “ road ” leading up to it through 
the ravine from the lake, and thus in conformity with 
the account which implies that the inhabitants of the city 
only learned what had happened after all was over. “ In 
the tombs,” “ and in the mountains ” which overhung the 
lake, the demoniac dwelt, and in his wilder paroxysms 
was driven beyond them into “ the wilderness ; ” that is, 
into the eastern Desert which succeeds to these very 
hills. Upon the lower slopes 2 of the hills, on those 
grassy slopes which a straining eye can discern even from 
the western side, the vast herd of two thousand swine 
were feeding,—a feature of the scene, which could hardly 
have occurred except amongst the Gentile settlers on the 
eastern shores; as in like manner the Latin name of 
“ Legion,” by which the demoniac called himself, is the 
expression of a foreign image. The “ cliff ” 3 down which 
the frantic herd rushed into the lake, must have been, as 
already implied, not an abrupt precipice, but one of those 
rocky faces into which the slopes, both of the eastern and 
western hills, break away, and such as are found in this 
instance close to the lake, though not descending sheer 
into the lake itself. 

The other great occasion of a visit to the eastern shore, 
was that on which 4 the multitudes were fed. Everything 
points to the north-eastern extremity of the lake. There, 


1 Origen says that most of the MSS. 
of Matt. -viii. 28, in his time had Gadara 
or Gerasa; neither of which spots 
agreed with the scene; but that there 
was a place, Gergesa, near which a rock 
was actually pointed out as the scene 
of the event. It is a case nearly 
analogous to the choice between the 
readings of Bethabara and Bethany, 
in John i. 28, for the sake of which 
Origen adduces it. (See Chapter VII.) 
At the same time x^P a T & v r adapyi/wv 
or Ycpavyvwv, may mean only “ the dis¬ 


trict of which Gadara (or Gerasa) is the 
capital.” 

2 7 rpbs ra opy, “ nigh—* at ’—the 
mountains.” Mark v. 11. 

3 koto rod Kpypuov. Mark v. 13, 
Luke viii. 33. Elliott (Travels, ii. 338) 
describes the rocks here as precipices. 
But there is no such expression in the 
more trustworthy account of Lord 
Lindsay. 

4 See a good article in the Journal of 
Sacred Literature, viii. p. 354. 


The de¬ 
struction 
of the 
swine. 


The feeding 
of the 
multitudes. 




374 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


The plain 
of Genne- 
sareth. 


whilst Jesus went in a boat straight across “to the 
other side/’ the multitudes would be able to go on foot 
from the villages of the Plain of Gennesareth, along the 
shore round the head of the lake. “ Bethsaida ” 1 is the 
eastern city of that name, which, from the importance of 
the new city, Julias, built there by Philip the Tetrarch, 
would give its name to the surrounding Desert tract; its 
old appellation lingering in the mouths of the Galilean 
peasants, just as “ Acco ” and “ Beth-gebra ” have to this 
day persisted in spite of “ Ptolemais ” and “ Eleutheropolis.” 
The “ desert place ” was either one of the green table¬ 
lands, visible from the hills on the western side ; or more 
probably, part of the rich plain at the mouth of the 
Jordan. In the parts of this plain not cultivated by the 
hand of man, would be found the “ much 2 green grass ” 
still fresh in the spring 3 of the year, when this event 
occurred, before it had faded away in the summer sun— 
the tall grass which, broken down by the feet of the 
thousands there gathered together, would make as it were 
4 couches' 4 for them to recline upon. Overhanging the 
plain was 44 the mountain 5 ” range of Golan, on whose 
heights 44 Jesus sat with his disciples,” and saw the multi¬ 
tude coming to them ; and to which, when the feast was 
over, 44 He again retired.” The contrary wind, which, 
blowing up the lake from the south-west, would prevent 
the boat from returning to Capernaum, would also bring 
44 other boats ” from Tiberias, the chief city on the south, 
to Julias, the chief city on the north, and so enable the 
multitudes, when the storm had subsided, 6 to cross at 
once, without the long journey on foot which they had 
made the day before. 

But the most sacred region of the lake—shall we not 
say of the world?—is the little Plain of Gennesareth, 
which has been already mentioned, on the western shore. 
Few scenes have undergone a greater change. Of all the 
numerous towns and villages in what must have been the 

1 For the distinction of the eastern 4 nXialas. Luke ix. 14. 

and western Bethsaida, see Reland, 564. 5 John vi. 3—15. 

2 Mark vi. 39 ; and John vi. 10. 6 John vi. 16—24. Compare Blunt’s 

3 John vi. 4. “The Passover . . . Veracity of the Gospels, p. 68. 

was nigh.” 




GALILEE. 


875 


most thickly-peopled district of Palestine, one only re¬ 
mains. A collection of a few hovels stands at the south¬ 
eastern corner of the plain, —its name hardly altered 
from the ancient Magdala or Migdol 1 —so called, probably, 
from a watch-tower, of which ruins appear to remain, that 
guarded the entrance of the plain; deriving its whole 
celebrity from its being the birthplace of her, through 
whom the name of “Magdalen” has been incorporated 
into the languages of the world. A large solitary thorn- 
tree stands beside it. Its situation, otherwise unmarked, 
is dignified by the high limestone rock which overhangs it 
on the south-west, perforated with caves, recalling, by a 
curious, though doubtless unintentional coincidence, the 
scene of Correggio's celebrated picture . 2 A clear stream 
rushes past it into the sea, issuing in a tangled thicket of 
thorn and willow from a deep ravine at the back of the 
plain,—the "WMy Hymam, the “ Valley of Doves," so called, 
perhaps, from the perforations which still continue in the 
rocks, in Josephus’s time the stronghold of robbers, now 
probably of wild pigeons. At the head of this ravine, 
is visible from most points of view in the plain, the horned 

I platform of the Mount of the Beatitudes. Two other 
ravines open on the plain through its western barrier, 
which is formed of green swelling hills, slightly broken by 
rocky crests. The plain itself is level, and everywhere 
cultivated. Another stream flows through it from the 
north-western, as that of Magdala from its south-western, 
ravine; joined at its entrance into the plain by a third, 
from the most copious spring of the whole region, now, 
from its large circular basin , 3 called the “Bound Fountain." 
There is yet a fourth, of equal breadth, but of shorter 
course, which, rising under a gigantic fig-tree, from which 


1 Lightfoot (ii. 308) placed Magdala 
on the eastern side. But “ Magdala ” 
must probably be the same as “ Mig- 
dal-el” in Joshua xix. 38, and if so, in 
the territory of Napthali, that is, on 
the western side. This, too, is the 
natural conclusion from Matt. xv. 39, 
and the distance from Tiberias agrees 
with that given in the Mishna. (See 
Schwarze, p. 189.) It may be observed 


that as Herodotus (ii. 159) turns Me- 
giddo into Magdalum, so some MSS., 
in Matt. xv. 39, turn Magdala into 
Magedon. (See Reland, Pal., p. 883; 
Von Raumer, Palastina, p. 118.) 

2 Probably the cave of Teliman or 
Talmanutha. (Schwarze, p. 189.) 

3 This I did not see. It is described 
only by Pococke (ii. 71) and Robinson 
(iii. 283). 





376 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


it derives its name, “ the Spring of the Fig-tree,” falls into 
the lake at the north-eastern extremity of the plain, close 
by a high projecting rock, which overhangs a solitary 
khan (Khan Minyeh). Beyond this point northward, the 
hills, though always leaving a beach, again advance close 
to the lake. This is the northern boundary of the 
plain. Just beyond it is another spring, with a ruined 
mill (Tabigah), to which the cattle from the neighbouring 
hills descend to drink; and further on, near the head of 
the lake, the fragments of some large edifice amongst the 
jungle, known by the name of Tell Hum, complete the 
signs of human habitation on the western shores. 

In some part of this region the home of Christ was 
situated. The illustrations which it furnishes to His 
parables and teaching, are numerous and decisive, and 
shall be mentioned in speaking of that subject as a whole . 1 
But there is nothing which enables us to fix with certainty 
the precise spots of the history of His residence. It 
would almost seem as if the woe pronounced against 
Capernaum had been literally fulfilled, as if the doom of 
Capernaum, the cities of the southern sea had been visited upon those 
of the north; as if it had been more tolerable for “ the 
land of Sodom ” in the day of its earthly judgment than 
for Capernaum. It has been indeed more tolerable in one 
sense; for the name, and perhaps even the remains, of 
Sodom are still to be found on the shores of the Bead 
Sea, whilst that of Capernaum 2 has, on the Lake of 
Gennesareth, been utterly lost. And in pronouncing 
that woe, it is possible that the comparison may have 
been suggested by the likeness, which I have noticed, 
between what must then have been the appearance of 


1 See Chap. XIII. 

2 Capernaum has at different times 
been fixed—l,at Medjel (Egmont); 2, at 
Khan Minyeh (Quaresmius and Robin¬ 
son) ; 3, at the Round Fountain (De 
Saulcy,ii.407); 4, at Tell Hfim (Ssewulf, 
p. 47, Williams, in Dr. Smith’s Geog. 
Diet.). If there were any ruins, as De 
Saulcy supposes, at the Round Fountain, 
this is the most likely hypothesis; (1.) as 
being in the plain of Gennesareth; (2.) 
and yet not actually on the sea-shore 


(Epiph. Hser., ii. p. 438); and (3.) being 
close to the spring, which, more than 
any other, corresponds to the spring 
of Caphar Nahum in Josephus. In 
favour of Tell HAm, are: 1, the name; 
2, the ruins ; 3, the fact, that its situa¬ 
tion best agrees with the reception of 
Josephus at Capharnoma after his acci¬ 
dent in the marsh at the head of the 
lake. (Vita, 27.) Against it is (1) the 
fact that there is no spring, (2) nor is 
it in the plain of Gennesareth. 


GALILEE- 


377 


the cities of the Plain of Gennesareth—(as is still, to a 
certain extent, the appearance of its outward features)— 
and what must have been in early ages the aspect of 
the Yale of Siddim. Still, it would be contrary to the 
general spirit of prophecy, whether in the Old or New 
Testament, to press this argument too far. 1 The woe, 
here as elsewhere, was doubtless spoken, not against 
the walls and houses of these villages, but against those 
who dwelt within them; and, as a matter of fact, it 
would appear that they did survive the terrible curse for 
many generations. There is no reason to doubt that 
the site at least of Capernaum was pointed out in the 
fourth century, when a church was built there by 
Joseph, Count of Tiberias. 2 It has since perished, with 
all the other sites of the Gospel cities, in the subsequent 
desolation which Arab hordes have brought on this once 
flourishing district. Yet although its disappearance 
cannot be ascribed to a direct judgment, there is another 
point of view in which it is worthy of notice. To 
any thoughtful student of the Gospel History it would 
have seemed that, of all places there recorded, the 
scene of our Lord's permanent residence—of His home 
for the three most important years of His life—would 
have been regarded as far more worthy of preserva¬ 
tion, than any other spot connected with His earthly 
course. None other could have witnessed so many of 
His works and words. To no other could His disciples 
have returned with such fond and familiar recollections, as 
that where they first became acquainted with Him, and 
which had witnessed the greater part of their intercourse 
with Him. Yet it is this which has passed away, without 
even a memorial or tradition to mark its place. The Sea 
of Galilee, with its towns, became, as we have seen, sacred 
in the eyes of the Jewish nation of a later time; and to 
their zeal we owe the retention of the names, and to some 
extent, the buildings, of Tiberias and of Magdala. But 
the Christian Church seems hardly to have made an 
effort to seek or to recover what ought to have been its 


1 See Chapter VI. 


a Epiph. Adv. Haer. i. 11. 


378 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


historical sanctuaries on these wonderful shores . 1 What¬ 
ever may have been the origin of this neglect—whether 
the difficulty of securing a hold on regions so firmly 
occupied by a hostile race, and so constantly exposed to 
Arab depredations, or the theological controversies which 
fixed the attention of the Christian world on questions 
connected rather with the Nativity and Death, than with 
the life and works, of Christ—the effect in the subsequent 
appreciation of the sacred localities is indisputable. Com¬ 
pared with Bethlehem, Nazareth, and Jerusalem, it may be 
almost said that Capernaum is an unknown name. It has 
gone, and, in its very destruction, remains a warning that 
for the preservation even of the holiest places no special 
interposition is to be expected ; that we must be content 
with general, not particular certainty : as at Jerusalem, so 
also in Galilee . 2 


1 The few traditional localities on the 
lake are manifestly wrong. 1. The 
Latin Church at Tiberias (a dependency 
on the Latin Convent at Nazareth) re¬ 
presents the scenes of Matt. xiv. 31—34, 
of Matt. xvii. 27, and of John xxi. 15, 
all of which are expressly stated to 
have occurred elsewhere. 2. The spot 
of the feeding of the five thousand is 
pointed out in the ravine between 
Hattin and Tiberias. This, which is 


contradicted by the whole tenor of the 
Gospel narrative, was probably selected 
for the convenience of pilgrims, who 
could not cross to the eastern side, 
and because of the five basaltic rocks, 
which are supposed to represent the 
five loaves. 3. The scene of the de¬ 
moniacs was fixed at the rock of Khan 
Minyeh; also no doubt for the con¬ 
venience of the western side. 

2 See Chapter XIY. 



CHAPTER XI. 


THE LAKE OF MEKOM AND THE SOURCES OF THE JORDAN. 

Judges xviii. 9, 10, 29. “‘Arise, that we may go up against them: 
for we have seen the land, and, behold, it is very good. When ye go, 
ye shall come unto a people secure, and to a large land : for God hath 
given it into your hands ; a place where there is no want of any thing 
that is in the earth.’ .... And they called the name of the city Dan, 
after the name of Dan their father, who was born unto Israel: howbeit 
the name of the city was Laish at the first.” 

Matt. xvi. 13. “Jesus came into the coasts of Caesarea Philippi. 





I. Upper valley of the Jordan—Kedesh-Naphtali—II. 
Battle of Merom—III. Sources of the Jordan.—1, 
Philippi—Hazor—Paneas—The Transfiguration. 


Lake of Merom— 
Dan—2. Caesarea 




THE LAKE OF MEROM AND THE SOURCES 
OF THE JORDAN. 


The Sea of Galilee, as we have seen, has no sacred 
associations but those of the New Testament. One peace¬ 
ful Presence dwells undisturbed on its shores and its waters 
from end to end. But the moment that the traveller 
emerges from its basin, he finds himself once more in the 
scenes of the old wars of the earliest times. The last 
object which he saw on the south before descending 
into its deep basin was the encampment of Barak ; and 
now on ascending and advancing northwards, he is again 
amidst the troubled times of Joshua and the Judges. 

Mounting from the shores of the Plain of Gennesareth, 
wider and wider glimpses of the lake open before he sees 
it for the last time. The broad opening at its southern end 
marks the rapid descent of the Jordan-valley ; Tabor, 
with the Mount of the Beatitudes as its outpost, is long 
visible above it. Over the wild green hills which skirt the 
feet of the commanding heights of Safed, he reaches the 
long undulating plain enclosed between the two lines of 
Anti-Libanus—the uppermost stage of the Jordan. The 
northern horizon is closed by Hermon with its double 1 
snow-clad peak, and beyond by Lebanon with its many 
heads in the further distance. 

On the eastern range which still retains its horizontal 
character, was Golan (of which the name is preserved), 
the sanctuary of the trans-Jordanic Manasseh. 2 On the 

1 Hencethe plural number “Hermon- 2 Deut. iv. 43; Josh. xx. 8; xxi. 

ites,” or “Hermons,” used in Psalm 27—now Djaulan. 
xlii. 6. 


Upper 
valley of 
the Jordan. 


Ranges of 
Naphthali 
and Man¬ 
asseh. 





382 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


Kedesh- 

Naphthali. 


Lake of 
Merom. 


western, which is broken and varied, are perched here 
and there castles of crusading celebrity, but mostly with¬ 
out any ancient interest. Amongst them, modern research 
has identified Kedesh-Naphthali , 1 the birthplace of Barak 
—the sanctuary, as its name implies, of the great tribe of 
Naphthali, by which the whole of this western range was 
occupied. All these places, it would seem, partake of 
the general character of the cities of this region—standing 
on rocky spurs or ridges, above green peaceful basins, 
high among the hills . 2 

II. But it is on the plain and its river that the main his¬ 
torical interest is concentrated. The plain is broken by wild 
downs, studded with Arab encampments—covered with 
countless herdsof cattle—chiefly the “bulls'’ and ‘buffaloes ' 3 
of Hermon and Bashan, which wander over the wide plain, 
and wallow or repose at full length in the copious streams, 
here as elsewhere in the Jordan-valley, descending from 
the western declivities. The rocks here begin to exchange 
the gray colour of the limestone formation of Central 
Palestine for the dark basalt—the “iron" as it v T as 
called in ancient days—of Bashan . 4 In the centre of this 
plain, half morass , 5 half tarn, lies the uppermost lake of 
the Jordan, about seven miles long, and in its greatest 
width, six miles broad, the mountains slightly compressing 
it at either extremity , 6 surrounded by an almost impe¬ 
netrable jungle of reeds, abounding in wild-fowl—the 
sloping hills near it scoured by herds of gazelles. 

This lake, now called Huleh, in old times bore 
the name of Merom, and afterwards of Samachon, 


1 Robinson, iii. 355. Judges, iv 6. 

2 See Forrest, in Journal of American 
Oriental Society, ii. 242, 244. 

3 The “ buffalo ” is the “ reem, ” 
(mistranslated “ unicorn ”) of the Old 
Testament. The pilgrim Willibald 
(p. 17) describes them as gigantic sheep. 

4 For the question whether basalt is 
derived from this, its main seat, in 
Bashan, see Von Raumer, (Palastina, 84.) 

5 “ The whole plain, taken together, 
is the largest marsh I have ever seen.” 
Account of the Sources of the Jordan, 
by the Rev. W. Thompson, an Ame¬ 

rican 'missionary, whose description of 
this region in the third volume of the 


Bibliotheca Sacra, is by far the best 
extant. A great part of it is extracted 
in Kitto’s Scripture Lands, p. 107, n. 
It is, perhaps, in this marshy region, 
rather than in the present Abil, that we 
ought to look for Abel Bethmaachah, 
also called Abel-Maim—the meadow of 
waters. 2 Kings xv. 29; 2 Chr. xvi. 4. 

6 “ I asked an Arab if I could not 
reach the lake through the swamp. 
He regarded me with surprise for some 
time, as if to ascertain whether I was 
in earnest, and then, lifting his hand, 
swore by the Almighty, the Great, that 
not even a wild boar could get through.” 
(Thompson.) 


LAKE OF MEROM AND SOURCES OF THE JORDAN. 


383 


both probably from its upland situation,—“ The High 
Lake /' 1 On its shores was fought the third and last 
conflict of Joshua with the Canaanites. After the 
capture of Ai and the battle of Beth-horon, which secured 
to him the whole of the south and centre of Palestine—a 
final gathering of the Canaanite races took place in the 
extreme north, under the king, who bore the hereditary 
title of Jabin , 2 and the name of whose city, Iiazor-, still 
lingers in the slopes of Hermon, at the head of the plain. 
Round him were assembled the heads of all the tribes who 
had not yet fallen under Joshua's sword. As the British 
chiefs were driven to the Land’s End before the advance of 
the Saxon, so at this Land’s End of Palestine were gathered 
for this last struggle, not only the kings 3 of the north, in 
the immediate neighbourhood, but from, the Desert-valley 
of the Jordan south of the sea of Galilee, from the maritime 


1 See Relaud’s Palestine, p. 262. This 
explanation of Merom is undoubted. 
Three explanations are given of Sa- 
machon, by which it is called in 
Josephus (Bell. Jud., III. x. 7; IV. i. 1.) 
and all later writers. 1. From the Arabic 
SamaJc, “high,” and thus a translation 
of Merom. 2. From the Chaldaic 
SamaJc, “ red,” in allusion to its muddy 
waters, as distinct from the clear basin 
of the Sea of Galilee. 3. From the 
Arabic Samach, “a fish.” This last, 
in itself reasonable, becomes improb¬ 
able from the fact that it could hardly 
be given as a distinctive epithet, in 
comparison with the plentiful fisheries 
of the Lake of Gennesareth. 4. From 
Sabac, “ a thorn,” so called from the 
thorny jungle round it. (See Lightfoot, 
Chorograph. Ant. i. 4; ii. p. 5.) It 
is called Sabac in the Babylonian, 
Samac in the Jerusalem Talmud, by 
the same interchange as Jamnia and 
Jahnia. (Ib. ii. 15.) The name of 
Huleh, as applied to the lake, is as old as 
the Crusades. (Robinson, iii. 356.) Bat 
as applied to the vicinity, it is at least 
as old as the Christian era. Josephus 
states (Ant. XV. x. 3) that Augustus 
gave Herod Ov\aOav /cal Flar/aSa, and 
OvAada is clearly the Greek form of 
Huleh, as ObAos (Ant. I. vi. 4) is of Hul 
in Genesis x. 23. (Fleischer, in Zeit- 
schrift D. M. G., ii. 428.) If it is called 
after this Hal, the patriarch, we may 
compare the tomb of Sitteh Huleh , the 


Lady Huleh, near Baalbec. It would 
seem that the whole country is called 
by this name, Beled-el-Hftleh (See 
Schwarze, 41), and the Lake, therefore, 
is probably called from the district, and 
not vice versd. The Ghwaranieh Arabs 
on its banks call it the Lake of El- 
Mallahah (the salt), and so it is called 
by William of Tyre (xviii. 13), (New- 
bold, Journ. As. Soc., xvi. 18), possibly 
from the saline crust which Burckhardt 
describes on its south-west shores 
(i. 316). This probably is the explana¬ 
tion of the name of Mellahah given to 
the clear spring at its north-west ex¬ 
tremity, and which was so called as 
being held by the neighbouring Arabs 
to be the source of the lake. Schwarze 
speaks of it (p. 29) as Ain Malka 
(“ spring of the King”). Another 
name given by the Arabs to this lake, 
from the fertility of its shores, is Bahr 
Hit (the Sea of Wheat). 

2 Josh. xi. 1. 

3 It is useless to seek for the precise 
localities of these northern prin¬ 
cipalities. Achshaph appears from the 
present Hebrew text (though not from 
the LXX) of Joshua xix. 25, to have 
been near the coast of Phoenicia. 
Madon is in the LXX Maron, the same 
word as that used for Merom; and 
and Shiniron is, in Josh. xii. 20 (accord¬ 
ing to the Hebi’ew text), called Shim- 
ron-meron. This, however, is a different 
word in its origin from Merom. 


Battle of 
Merom. 


384 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


plain of Philistia, from the heights above Sharon, and 
‘from the still unconquered Jehus, to the Hivite who dwelt 
in the valley of Baalbec. . . . “ under Hermon ; ” all 

these “ went out, they and all their hosts with them, even 
as the sand is upon the seashore in multitude, ... and 
when all these kings were met together, they came and 
pitched together at the waters of Merom to fight against 
Israel.” 1 The new and striking feature of this battle, as dis¬ 
tinct from those of Ai and Gibeon, consisted in the “horses 
and chariots very many,” which now for the first time appear 
in the Canaanite warfare, and it was the use of these 
which probably fixed the scene of the encampment by the 
lake, along whose level shores they could have full play 
for their force. It was this new phase of war which 
called forth the special command to Joshua, nowhere else 
recorded : “ Thou shalt hough their horses, and burn their 
chariots with fire.” Nothing is told us of his previous 
movements. All that we know is, that on the eve of the 
battle he was within a day’s march of the lake. On the 
morrow, by a sudden descent, like that which had raised 
the siege of Gibeon, he and all the people of war “fell ” 2 
like a thunderbolt upon them “ in the mountain ” 3 slopes 
of the plain, before they had time to rally on the level 
ground. In the sudden panic “ the Lord delivered them 
into the hand of Israel, who smote them, and chased 
them ” westward over the mountains above the gorge of 
the Leontes “to Sidon,” and eastward to the “plain” of 
“ Massoch ” or “ Mizpeh.” 4 The rout was complete, and 
the cavalry and chariots which had seemed so formidable 
were visited with special destruction. The horses were 
hamstrung, and the chariots burned with fire. And it is 


1 Josh. xi. 5. 

8 “ Fell," Josh. xi. 7. So the word 
is to be literally translated, as in 
the corresponding passage, Job i. 
15, “The Sabeans fell upon them.” 

* Joshua xi. 7. The LXX reads, 
e^eircarav e?r* avrovs 4v rp opeiurj j 
adding apparently *m after or instead 
of om. 

4 This is still further fixed by the 
use of the word Beka, then, as now, the 
name for the plain of Coele-Syria, and 
also by the precise description of it, 


(xi. 17), “The ‘plain ’ of Lebanon under 
Hermon.” In this case the eastward 
direction (verse 8) is spoken of in refer¬ 
ence to Sidon; and Baal Gad will be the 
Temple of the God of Destiny (Gad) in 
Baalbec. (See Ritter, iv. 229.) Mizpeh, 
or (LXX) Massoch, will then be some 
place in this plain. Misrephoth-waim 
cannot be identified, but its name (“the 
flow of waters ”) is naturally applied to 
the rise or to the exit of the Leontes 
from the Valley of Baalbec. 


LAKE OF MEROM AND SOURCES OF THE JORDAN. 


385 


not till the revival of the city of Hazor, under the 
second Jabin, long afterwards, 1 that they once more 
appear in force against Israel, descending, as now, 
from this very plain. Far over the western hills Joshua 
pursued the flying host, before “he turned back,” and 
“ took Hazor,” and “ burned it ” to the ground. 2 The 
battle of the Lake of Merom was to the north, what the 
battle of Beth-horon had been to the south ;—more 
briefly told, less complete in its consequences, but still the 
decisive conflict by which the four northern tribes were 
established in the south of Lebanon, by which Galilee, 
with its sacred Sea, and the manifold consequences therein 
involved, was included within the limits of the Holy Land. 

III. The Lake of Merom no more appears in history. 3 
But its geographical interest, at which we have already 
glanced, as the point from which the Jordan finally 
issues in its downward course, carries us on to the 
springs of those immortal streams, which here, for the 
first time, unite in one unbroken and distinct river. The 
undulating plain still continues, but narrowing as it 
approaches its head, and increasing in richness of soil and 
cultivation, till it almost resembles the Plain of Gen- 
nesareth, in the rank luxuriance of its feathery reeds 
and thorn, and thickets of oleander ; marking, however, 
the difference of elevation by here exhibiting only their 
green foliage, whilst those on the shores of the Sea of 
Galilee were already blazing with their red blossoms. 4 
Here, for the same reason, the vegetation is distinguished 
from that of the Jordan on its lower level; and whereas 
in the hot Ghor, it flows through a thicket of willows 
and tamarisks, in these upper regions its foliage is the 
same as that of the Leontes, sycomores and oleanders. 5 
This mass of vegetation implies that we are approaching 
the watershed of Palestine. Besides the clear springs 

1 Jud. iv. 2. nal of American Oriental Society, 1849, 

2 Joshua xi. 10, 11. ii. 242), and Van de Velde, 1852 (ii. 

3 The name of Joshua is preserved 416). Also it appears in the mountain 
in a local tradition, which points out Tell Farash (Farash being an Arabic 
the tomb of Yusha (Joshua) near Mai- name for Joshua), on the east of the 
lahah, at its north-west extremity, plain. (Schwarze, 60.) 

still visited by the sect of the Meta- 4 I am speaking of April 6, 1853. 

wileh. It is described by Forrest (Jour- 5 See Van de Velde, ii. 433. 


Sources of 
the Jordan. 


c c 





386 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


Lower 
source of 
the Jordan 
at Tel-el- 
Kadi. 


which have been pouring down their full-grown streams 
into the valley from the western ranges, we now find 
countless rills winding through the reedy jungles and the 
rich fields of millet, corn, and sweet peas, from the hills 
which begin to close the plain, upon the north. Then 
descends, under deep shades of sycomore, the turbid 
torrent of the Hasbeya, which rushing from far up in the 
heights of Anti-Libanus, through a deep gorge of basalt, 
may claim, in a strictly scientific sense, to be the parent 
stream of the whole valley. 1 And now, close above this 
mass of verdure, its own slopes sprinkled with trees, 
Hermon rises over us, a long ascent of snow, like 
the Sierra Nevada above the Yega of Granada. From 
these slopes springs the most illustrious of earthly streams. 
It is not always that the sources of great rivers corre¬ 
spond to the future course of their progeny. But those 
of the Jordan meet every requirement. Geographically 
they might be perhaps sought elsewhere ; but historically, 
the sight of the springs which we have now reached, at 
once vindicates and explains their claim. 

1. The first and westernmost is at the foot of a green 
eminence, overgrown with shrubs. From its north-west 
corner, a magnificent spring,—the exemplar, so to speak, 
of all those tributaries that we have seen along its banks 
from En-gedi upwards,—bursts forth into a wide crystal 
pool, sending forth at once a wide crystal river through 
the valley. It receives, as it winds round the hill, another 
burst of many rills, creeping out from underneath the roots 
of a venerable oak, which by its size and beauty carries 
one back to that of Mamre in the far south, and which 
is still in a manner consecrated by spreading its branches 
over the tomb of a Mussulman saint. 2 It has been some- 


1 Its source, which seems to be as 
beautiful and copious as all the others 
of the valley, is well described by Mr. 
Thompson (Bibliotheca Sacra, vol. iii.), 
and by Captain Newbold, (Journ. As. 
Soc. xvi. 15, 16). 

2 Schwarze (202) says, hesitatingly, 
that it is said to be the tomb of the 
Prophet Iddo. If, as is probable, Iddo 
was the prophet who warned Jeroboam 
at Bethel, this is a curious, yet not 
unnatural, transfer. The modern name 


of the wooded hill is Tell-el -Kadi, 
generally supposed to be the Arabic 
translation of Dan (the Judge). This 
is perfectly reasonable. A similar 
translation occurs in the Turkish 
and Greek names of the Bithynian 
Olympus—Gaziz Bournou—Vouno Ka- 
ligero. But may not the name be 
derived from the tomb of the old Mus¬ 
sulman saint ? His name was said by our 
guides to be “Sheykh Israik.” I use the 
word “oak” for Sindian. 





LAKE OF MEROM AND SOURCES OF THE JORDAN. 


387 


times asked, why the Jordan was not traced to the source 
of the more powerful stream of Hasbeya, which has just 
been noticed, or confined to the real origin of its unbroken 
course in the Lake of Merom. 1 No one who has seen 
the burst of clear and living water from these gentle 
shades—so distinct from the turbid rush or stagnant marsh 
of either of those other claimants,—could hesitate for a 
moment. There at once the Israelite would recognise the 
birth-place of his own life-giving and mysterious river. 

The hill itself—apparently an extinct crater 2 —rises 
from the plain with somewhat steep terraces, and a long- 
level top ; and from this again, immediately above the 
spring, rises another swelling knoll, with another level top, 
now strewn with ruins. This is the town and the citadel 
of Dan , — the northern frontier of the Holy Land. That Dan. 
height commands the view of the whole rich plain. In 
the south, the Lake of Merom, stretched out like a sheet 
of water above a dam, marks the first descent of the 
J ordan ; beyond, a deep rent in the mountains, indicates 
the yet further outlet, through wdiich it plunges into 
the Sea of Galilee. The eastern hills still preserve their 
horizontal outline,—the western still their broken form. 
Here is explained how, in this sequestered and beautiful 
stronghold, the people of Laish “ dwelt secure,” sepa¬ 
rated by the huge mass of Lebanon and half of Anti- 
Lebanon from their mother city of Sidon, and “ there 
was no deliverer in their hour of need,” because “ they 
were far from Sidon.” Up this rich plain came the 
roving Danites from the south. Since the victory of 
Merom these southern regions had hardly been explored ; 
they saw at once, as we see still, how it was “ a large 
land,”—“very good,”—“a place where there is no 
want of anything that is in the earth.” 3 And on 

1 The source which, in the time of basin of black basalt. The neighbour- 
Josephus, was traced to the circular ing Arabs have the same notion as was 
lake of Phiala, or “the Bowl,” is never current in the time of Josephus, of its 
mentioned in the Scriptures, and is now connection with the springs at Banias. 
proved to have no connection with the (Bell. Jud., III. x. 7.) 

Jordan. It is well described by Captain 2 See Mr. Thompson’s account (Bib- 
Newbold (Joum. As. Soc., xvi. 8—10), liotheca Sacra, iii. 197). He thinks, 
who also mentions another source a little but, as Dr. Robinson shows, without 
to the east of it, seen only by himself. just cause, that Dan was at Banias. 

It appears to be an extinct crater, in a 3 Jud. xviii. 9, 10. 

c c 2 






388 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


this hill, by the source of their sacred river, the little 
colony from the southern tribe set up their capital, and 
called it Dan “ after the name of Dan their father ; ” 1 
and, far removed as it was from all the sacred places of 
the south, there they set up their sanctuary also. A 
miniature Shiloh rose in that beautiful grove—a teraphim, 
and a graven image, and a priesthood of irregular creation, 
till the time when, after the fall of Shiloh, 2 and the troubled 
and lawless period of the Judges, such unauthorised 
practices were probably put down by the strong hand of 
Samuel. But a sacred place it still remained ; and there 
for his remoter subjects, Jeroboam first erected the temple 
with the Golden 3 Calf, for those to whom a pilgrimage 
to Bethel or Jerusalem was alike irksome. 

It is doubtful whether the delineation of Dan in Jacob’s 
blessing, relates to the original settlement on the western 
outskirts of Judah, or to this northern outpost. Herder’s 
explanation will apply almost equally to both. “Dan,” 
the judge, “ shall judge his people,”—he the son of the 
concubine no less than the sons of Leah, he the frontier 
tribe, no less than those in the places of honour,— 
shall be “ as one of the tribes of Israel.” “ Dan shall 
be a serpent by the way, an adder in the path,”— 
that is of the invading enemy by the north, or by the 
west,—“ that biteth the heels of the horse,”—the indige¬ 
nous serpent biting the foreign horse unknown to Israelite 
warfare,—“ so that his rider shall fall backwards.” And 
his war-cry as from these frontier fortresses shall be “ For 
thy salvation, 0 Lord, I have waited.” 4 In the blessing 
of Moses, the southern Dan is lost sight of—the northern 
Dan alone appears, with the same characteristics, though 
under a different image ; “ a lion’s whelp ” in the far 
north, as Judah was in the far south: “he shall leap 5 

1 Jud. xviii. 29. vicinity. (Newbold, Journ. As. Soc. 

2 Jud. xviii. 30. “ Till the day of xvi. 27.) 

the captivity of the land,” i. e. under 4 Gen. xlix. 16,17,18 ; Herder, Heb. 
the Philistines. (1 Sam. iv. 22.) Ewald Poes. p. 195. 

(Geschichte, 2nd edit. iii. part 2, 5 Deut. xxxiii. 22. The same warlike 

p. 258) reads “ the Ark,” for “ the character is indicated in the name 
land.” which so long lingered in the southern 

3 The worship of the Calf may be settlement, “ Mahaneh-Dan ” — “ the 

traced to this day in the secret rites of camp of Dan.” (See Ewald, vol. ii. 

the Nosairi and Druse saints in the part 2, p. 378.) 


LAKE OF MEROM AND SOURCES OF THE JORDAN. 


389 


from Bashan,” from the slopes of Hermon, where he is 
couched watching for his prey. 

2. With Ban the Holy Land properly terminates. But the 
easternmost source of the Jordan, about four miles distant, 
is so intimately connected with it both by historical and 
geographical association that we must go forwards yet a 
little way into the bosom of Hermon. Over an unwonted 
carpet of turf,—through trees of every variety of foliage,— 
through a park-like verdure, which casts a strangely 
beautiful interest over this last recess of Palestine, the 
pathway winds, and the snowy top of the mountain itself 
is gradually shut out from view by its increasing nearness, 
and again there is the rush of waters through deep thickets, 
and the ruins of an ancient town—not Canaanite, but 
Roman—rise on the hill side ; in its situation, in its 
exuberance of water, its olive-groves, and its view over the 
distant plain, almost a Syrian Tivoli. 

This is Ccesarea Philippi —chosen doubtless on this 
very account, by Philip the Tetrarch as the site of his 
villas and palaces, beside the temple here dedicated by 
his father Herod to the great patron of their family, 
Augustus Csesar. Yet this, though its chief historical 
name, is not its only one. At the outskirts of the 
Holy Land it combines 1 in a tangled web all its asso¬ 
ciations almost from first to last. High on the rocky 
slopes above the town still lingers the name of Hazor , 
in the earliest times, as we have seen, the capital of 
Northern Palestine—“the head 2 .of all those kingdoms.” 
A few rude stone blocks on a rocky eminence mark the 
probable site of the capital of Jabin, 3 and close beside it 
still remains a deep circular grove of ilexes—perhaps the 
best likeness which now exists of the ancient groves so 
long identified with the Canaanitish worship of Astarte. 
Hard by this height of Hazor, but commanding a nearer 
view of the plain, is the Castle of Shubeibeh, the largest 
of its kind in the East, and equal in extent even to 
the pride of European castles at Heidelberg; built, as it 

1 On a mount, three miles north of 3 In an Arabic version, mentioned 

Banias, Jewish tradition fixes the scene by Schwarze (91), Jabin is called “ King 
of Gen. xv. 10. (Schwarze, 202.) of Caesarea.” 

2 Joshua, xi. 10. 


Upper 
source of 
the Jordan 
at Banias. 


Caesarea 

Philippi. 


Hazor. 


390 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


would appear, in part by the Herodian princes, in part 
by Saracenic chiefs ; famous in the days of the Crusades, 
as the residence of one of the chiefs of thb Assassins, 
the “ old man ” of the mountain. 1 

But the main centre of attraction is the higher 
source of the Jordan. Underneath the high red limestone 
cliff 2 which overhangs the town it bursts out, not, as in 
the lower or westernmost source, in a full spring, but in 
Paneas. many rivulets, 3 which, issuing from the foot of the rock, 
first form a large basin, and then collect into a rushing 
stream. It penetrates through the thickets on the hill¬ 
side, and in the vale below, at some point which has 
never been exactly verified, joins the stream from Dan. 
In the face of the rock immediately above the spring 
is the large grotto which furnished a natural sanctuary not 
indeed to the Israelites, who, perhaps, never penetrated 
so far, but to the Greeks of the Macedonian kingdom of 
Antioch. We have often had occasion to observe how 
slightly in the choice of their natural sanctuaries the 
Hebrews seem to have been influenced by the local beauty 
or grandeur of the spot : how modern is that “ religion 
of caves” which in the Christian times of Palestine has 
played so important a part. 4 At last we have arrived at 
an exception to this rule; and this shows that we are 
on the confines of the Gentile world. The cavern-sanc¬ 
tuary of Caesarea, unknown to Israelite history, was at 
once adopted by the Grecian settlers, both in itself and 
for its romantic situation the nearest likeness that Syria 
affords of the beautiful limestone grottos which in their 
own country were inseparably associated with the worship 
of the sylvan Pan. This was the one Paneum or “sanc¬ 
tuary of Pan,” within the limits of Palestine, which before 
the building of Philip's city gave to the town the name 
of Paneas , a name which has outlived the Roman sub- 

1 This site of Hazor is doubted surface of which has reddened in 
both by Mr. Thompson and Dr. Robin* weathering.” (Captain Newbold, Jour- 
son—the former fixing it at Hunin nal As. Soc. xvi. 4.) 

(Biblioth. Sacr. iii. 202), the latter 3 “ Three (1) streams which fall over 
further south. (See also Ritter, Jordan, a plateau at the base of the cliffs, 
p. 205). shaded by a verdant grove of poplars 

2 “The cliffs are about 80 feet high, of and oleanders.” (76.11.) 

compact buff-coloured limestone, the 4 See Chapter II. 


LAKE OF MEROM AND SOURCES OF THE JORDAN. 


391 


stitute, and still appears in the modern appellation of 
Banias. Greek inscriptions in the face of the rock testify 
its original purpose ; the reverence thus begun, was con¬ 
tinued by the Romans ; the white marble temple built by 
Herod to Augustus crowned its summit; and in later times 
Jewish pilgrims 1 mistook the traces of this Gentile 
worship for the vestiges of the altar of the Danites and 
Jeroboam; and Christian or Mussulman devotion has 
erected above it one of the numerous tombs dedicated to 
the mysterious saint whom the one calls St. George and 
the other Elijah. 

But amidst these Pagan recollections of Paneas or 
Caesarea Philippi, there is one passage which brings it 
within the confines of Sacred History. As it is the northern¬ 
most frontier of Palestine, so it is the northernmost limit 
of the journeys of Our Lord. In the turning point of His 
history, when “ from that time many of His disciples went 
back and walked no more with Him,” when even the 
Twelve seemed likely e< to go awayand He “ could no 
more walk in Judaea because the Jews sought to kill 
Him; ” then He left His familiar haunts on the Sea of 
Galilee, to return to them, as far as we know, only once 
more. He crossed to the north-eastern corner of the 
lake, and passed, as it would seem, up the rich plain along 
its eastern side , 2 and came into “ the parts,” into “ the 
villages ” of Caesarea Philippi. It is possible that He never 
reached the city itself; but it must at least have been in 
its neighbourhood that the confession of Peter was made; 
the rock on which the Temple of Augustus stood, and 
from which the streams of the Jordan issue, may pos¬ 
sibly have suggested the words which now run round 
the dome of St. Peter’s. And here one cannot but 
ask what was the “ high mountain ” on which, six days 
from that time, whilst still in this region, “ He was 
transfigured” before His three disciples ? It is impossible 

1 Benjamin of Tudela, Early Travel- is said to have returned from Caesarea 

lers, 90. “ through Galilee/’ (Mark, ix. 30,)—as if 

2 This seems to be implied by two implying that He then first re-entered 
passages. 1. If “Bethsaida ” of Mark, it, which would be the case if His ap- 
viii. 22, is that on the east of the Jor- proach to Caesarea had been through 
dan, this makes his starting-point for Gaulonitis. 

that journey to be from the east. 2. He 


Mount of 
the Trans¬ 
figuration. 


392 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


to look up from the plain to the towering peaks of 
Hermon, almost the only mountain which deserves the 
name in Palestine, and one of whose ancient titles was 
derived from this circumstance, and not he struck with 
its appropriateness to the scene. That magnificent 
height—mingling with all the views of Northern Pales- 
tine from Shechem upwards—though often alluded to as 
the northern barrier of the Holy Land, is connected with 
no historical event in the Old or New Testament. 
Yet this fact of its rising high above all the other hills 
of Palestine, and of its setting the last limit to the 
wanderings of Him who was sent only to the lost sheep 
of the house of Israel, falls in with the supposition which 
the words inevitably force upon us. High up on its 
southern slopes there must be many a point where the 
disciples could be taken “ apart by themselves.” Even 
the transient comparison of the celestial splendour with 
the snow, where alone it could be seen in Palestine, 
should not, perhaps, be wholly overlooked. At any rate, 
the remote heights above the sources of the Jordan 
witnessed the moment, when His work in His own pecu¬ 
liar sphere being ended, He set His face for the last time 
“ to go up to Jerusalem.” 1 


1 Mark ix. 2, 3; Luke ix. 51. 


lo a&Bsq jgnhevsrol odi ol nislq odi moil qu ic 
odj KOT*i 98 of) r.' w nirinjjom -.no cjIj Isora [b o 
8bw eoLtij rasiori.R evodw lo ena fcnfi rri 

’ 

CHAPTER XII. 

LEBANON.—DAMASCUS. 

The goodly mountain, even Lebanon.—Deut. iii. 25. 
Abana and Pharpar, rivers of Damascus.—2 Kings v. 12. 


dir 

« p\ 




A 






Lebanon :—I. In relation to Palestine. II. In relation to the Leontes. 
III. In relation to the Orontes. IV. The Barada and Damascus. 





•k> -0 ba* VwtanoM »JidV/ gdJ— 

bl'.> vttt io LfliniioM edj— xlAiffdS^so .lM oi 

U r. U5*e-.,. U '• sdj. t n«M 

mu ^otah; bne tmnifiD odi ai dl .qo 4 J 
• fi Jwuuom jagitgid odi to quibc •ij'iol 



LEBAN ON —DAMASCUS. 


With Dan, or Caesarea Philippi, the Holy Land ter¬ 
minates. But its scenery and geography cannot be consi¬ 
dered complete without a few words on the vast mountain 
region which forms its physical barrier ; and which, as has 
been several times observed in the course of these pages, 
is the foundation of the whole structure of the country. 
Lebanon closes the Land of Promise on the north, as the 
peninsula of Sinai on the south ; but with this difference, 
that Lebanon, though beyond the boundaries of Palestine, 
is almost always within view. The thunder-storm, which 
the Psalmist tracks in its course throughout his country, 
begins by making the solid frame of Lebanon and Sirion 
to leap for fear, like the buffaloes of their own forests, 
and ends by shaking the distant wilderness of the lofty 
cliffs of Kadesh. 1 From the moment that the traveller 
reaches the plain of Shechem in the interior, nay, even 
from the depths 2 of the Jordan-valley by the Dead Sea, the 
snowy heights of Hermon are visible. The ancient names 
of its double range are all significant of this position. It 
was “ Sion, 3 " “ the upraised ; ” or “ Hermon/' “ the lofty 
peak/' or “ Shenir, 4 " and “ Sirion/' the glittering “breast¬ 
plate" of ice ; or, above all, “Lebanon," the “Mont Blanc" 
of Palestine ; “ the White Mountain 5 " of ancient times ; 


1 Psalm, xxix. 8—8. 

2 For this fact I am indebted to Mr. 
Williams, author of the Holy City. 

3 Deut. iv. 48. 

4 Deut. iii. 9; Cant. iv. 8; Ezekiel, 
xxvii. 5. 

5 Such is the meaning of “ Lebanon ” 


—the “ White Mountain,” and Gebel- 
es-Sheikh—the “ Mountain of the Old 
Man, Gebel-et-Tilj—the “Mountain of 
Ice,” doubtless derived from the snowy 
top. It is the natural and almost uni¬ 
form name of the highest mountains 
in all countries —Mont Blanc — Hima - 





SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


the mountain of the “ Old White-headed man,” or the 
“ Mountain of Ice,” in modern times. So long as its snowy 
tops were seen, there was never wanting to the Hebrew 
poetry the image of unearthly grandeur, which nothing 
else but perpetual snow can give ; especially as seen in the 
summer, when “ the firmament around it seems to be on 
fire.” 1 And not grandeur only, but fertility and beauty 
were held up, as it were, on its heights, as a model for the 
less fortunate regions which looked up to it. “ His fruit 
shall shake like Lebanon .” 2 The “ dews ” of the mists that 
rose from its watery ravines, or of the clouds that rested 
on its summit, were perpetual witnesses of freshness and 
coolness, the sources, as it seemed, of all the moisture,- i 
which was to the land of Palestine what the fragrant 
oil was to the garments of the High Priest; what the 
refreshing influence of brotherly love was to the whole 
community . 3 In the longings of the Hebrew lawgiver, 
the one distinct image which blended with the general 
hope of seeing “ the good land beyond Jordan,” was of 
“ the ‘ good' mountain, even Lebanon . 4 ” Anji deep within 
the recesses of the mountain, beneath its crest of ice and 
snow, was the sacred forest of cedars, famous, even to those 
who had never seen them, for their gigantic magnificence, 
endeared to the heart of the nation by the treasures 
thence supplied to the Temple and the Palace of Jerusalem . 5 

Beyond this general impression on the imagination of 
the people of Israel, there is no connection between Lebanon 
and the history of the Old Testament; and, with the one 
uncertain exception of the Transfiguration , 6 none with the 
history of the New. 


layah (in Sanscrit signifying snowy )— 
Imaus—Hcemus (probably from the 
same root )—Sierra Nevada—Ben Nevis 
— Snowdon . 

1 Clarke’s Travels, iv. 203. 

2 Psalm lxxii. 16. 

3 Such must be the general meaning 
of the comparison of concord to “the 
dew of Hermon, that descended on the 
mountains of Zion.” Ps. cxxxiii. 3. If 
Zion be here Jerusalem, the sense must 
be that the beneficial effects of the cool 
vapours of the lofty Hermon were felt 
even to the dry and distant mountains 
of Judsea. (Compare the passage just 


referred to, Ps. xxix. 6—8.) It is, how¬ 
ever, just possible, that Zion may here 
be used for Sion, the ancient name for 
Hermon, and the expression is then 
merely the Hebrew parallelism. Tim 
is slightly confirmed by the use of the 
plural “ mountains,” which, though ap¬ 
plicable to the vast range of Hermon, 
is not applicable, and is not elsewhere 
used, for the hill of Jerusalem. For 
the fact of the dew of Hermon, see 
Van de Velde, i. 127. n 

i Deut. iii. 25. 

5 See Chapter JI. 
fi See Chapter XI. 



LEBANON—DAMASCUS. 


397 


But the physical relation of Lebanon to Syria is so 
important, that it may be well, once for all, in conclusion, 
to give such of its features as bring out prominently its 
importance as the birth-place of the four rivers of Judsea 
and Phoenicia, of Antioch and Damascus ; the chief seat 
of Syrian cultivation and comfort; the border-land of 
Sacred and common history; the scene of the oldest 
traditions and civilisation of the world ; the meeting-point 
of all the religions of western Asia. 

I. The views from Lebanon over Palestine correspond to 
those of Pisgah from the east, and though never men¬ 
tioned precisely in history, must have been the glimpse of 
the Holy Land enjoyed by the old Assyrian conquerors as 
they first looked down from this “ tower of Lebanon ” 1 
upon their prey . 2 

“A magnificent view,—including Gennesareth, (‘the mists of 
the sea of Tiberias rose behind and dimmed the mountains of 
Moab/) the castles of Lebanon, Tyre, and Scala Tyriorum, and at 
sunset * Cyprus in the midst of the great wide sea/—is seen from 
Jurjua, near the source of the Zahrany. ‘Immediately before us 
lay Beled-es-Shukif 3 (the south-western range of Lebanon) its hills 
like ant-heaps, with one here and there taller than the rest, and 
a glen, or winding valley, deeper than its fellows, breaking the 
uniformity of the swell and fall of the surface. All near us was 
green with growing grain, and the more remote surface yellow with 
ripening crops.” 4 

“I have travelled in no part of the world where I have seen such 
a variety of glorious mountain scenes within so narrow a compass. 
Not the luxurious Java, not the richly wooded Borneo, not the 
majestic. Sumatra or Celebes, not the paradise-like Ceylon, far less 
the grand but naked mountains of South Africa, or the low impene¬ 
trable woods of the West Indies, are to be compared to the southern 
projecting mountains of Lebanon. In yonder lands all is green or 
all is bare. An Indian landscape has something monotonous in its 
superabundance of wood and jungle, that one wishes in vain to see 
intermingled with rocky cliffs or with towns or villages. In the 

1 Cant. vii. 4. Shukif (Belfort), which must always have 

2 The following extracts are thrown commanded the Pass of the Lit&ny from 
together partly from my own recol- Sidon into the plain of Laish, and the 
lections, partly from other writers, road to Damascus. (Ritter, Lebanon, 
whose words I quote to supply what I 311.) 

was unable to see myself. 4 Journal of American Oriental So- 

3 This district is so called from the oiety, ii. 245, 24 et 6. 

old castle of the Crusaders, Kalat-es- 


Lebanon in 
its relation 
to Palestine 
and the 
Jordan. 


398 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


Lebanon in 
its relation 
to the 
Leontes. 


bare table-lands of the Cape Colony, the eye discovers nothing but 
rocky cliffs .... It is not so, however, with the southern ranges 
of Lebanon. Here there are woods and mountains, streams and 
villages, bold rocks and green cultivated fields, land and sea views. 
Here, in one word, you find all that the eye could desire to behold 
on this earth. . . . The whole of Northern Canaan lies at our feet. 
Is not this Sidon ? Are not those Sarepta and Tyre, and Ras-el- 
Abial P I see also the Castle of Shukif, and the gorge of the Leontes, 
and the hills of Safed, and, in the distance, the basin of the Sea of 
Tiberias, with the hills of Bara, far, far away; and all these 
hundreds of villages between the spot we are at and the sea-coast. 
.... Half a day would not suffice for taking the angles of such 
an ocean of villages, towns, castles, rivers, hills, and capes.” 1 

In these descriptions it is important to observe how 
it was that Cyprus, thus visible from the mainland 
to the Hebrew people, represented the whole western 
world. In that wide waste of western waters, the eye 
rested on the high outline of “ Chittim ” alone, and “ Chit- 
tim ” thus became the first stepping-stone to the isles of 
the West . 2 So it was in the visions of Balaam and Ezekiel, 
—so it became actually in the voyages of Paul and 
Barnabas ; so in the coming and going of the Crusaders, 
whose “ Te Deumat the first sight of the Holy Land 
was sung on the shores of Cyprus. 

II. It has been already observed, that the western¬ 
most of the Four Rivers of the Lebanon—the river of 
Phoenicia—is almost without a name. Its popular name 
of “ Leontes v is unknown to ancient writers; its native 
name of “ Litany ” is confined only to its upper course ; 
and so imperfectly has it been explored, that it is 
only by probable conjecture that it can be identified 
with its lower course—the large stream which, under the 
separate name of “ Khasimyehor “ the boundary,” 
issues from the mountains and falls into the sea a few 
miles north of Tyre. Its peculiar interest, however, lies 
in the beautiful gorge which it has formed through the 
Lebanon, and its rise in the vale of Coele-Syria . 3 

1 Van de Velde, ii. 488. The view 2 See Chapter VII., p. 115. 

from the summit of Hermon is well 3 For the Leontes, see Chapters II. 

given by Mr. Porter. (Journal of Sacred and VII. 

Literature, vol. v. p. 48.) 


LEBANON—DAMASCUS. 


399 


1. THE RAVINE OF THE LEONTES. 

‘The cleft is very narrow and the rocks rise perpendicularly to the 
height of sometimes a thousand or twelve hundred feet. The froth, 
as it dashes up, keeps the base of the rock constantly damp, so that 
the vegetation of this place is luxuriant to a degree that I have 
seldom met with in my travels. The snow-white foam is often con¬ 
cealed by the overhanging trees whose branches meet and thickly 
intertwine.” 1 

2 . CCELE-SYRIA. 

We finally looked down on the vast green and red valley— 
green from its yet unripe corn, red from its vineyards 9 not yet 
verdant—which divides the range of Lebanon and Anti-Lebanon; 
the former reaching its highest point in the snowy crest to the 
north, behind which lie the Cedars; the latter, in the still more 
snowy crest of Hermon: the culmination of the range being thus 
in the one at the northern, in the other at the southern extremity, 
of the valley which they bound. The view of this great valley is 
chiefly remarkable as being exactly to the eye what it is on maps— 
the “ hollow ” between the two mountain ranges of “ Syria.” A 
screen through which the Leontes breaks out closes the south end 
of the plain. There is a similar screen at the north end, but too 
remote to be visible. It is in the centre of the plain that you find 
the ruins of Baalbec. 

That northern screen of hills, with its opening beyond, 
is “ the entering in of Hamath , 3 ” so often mentioned as 
the extreme limit, in this direction, of the widest possible 
inheritance of Israel. The huge walls of Baalbec repre¬ 
sent, in all probability, the ancient sanctuary which com¬ 
manded the route of commercial traffic through these 
northern defiles , 4 as Petra, at a later period, served the 
same purpose in the southern Desert. 

III. The northern river is the Orontes. The others, 
though perennial, have yet the appearance of mountain 
streams : the Orontes alone is said to have the aspect 
of a true river. With this agrees the account of the 
abundant springs 5 which form its source, immediately 
north of the rise of the Leontes. Worthily of its 

1 Van de Velde, ii. 437. rarely described, but geographically 

2 See also the description of the important, see Piickler Muskau, iii. 

gorges, and vineyards and forests, Van 22; Van de Velde, ii. 470; Schwarze, 25. 
de Velde, ii. 437—439. 4 See Ritter; Lebanon, 236. 

3 Num. xiii. 21; 2 Kings xiv. 25; 5 Van de Velde, ii. 471. Ritter; 

2 Chr. vii. 8, &c. For this opening, Lebanon, pp. 177, 996. 


Lebanon in 
its relation 
to the 
Orontes. 




400 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


origin the river rolls on ; and, whether in the length 
of its course, or the volume of its waters, or the rich 
vegetation of its banks, it is not surprising that, to 
the Roman world, the Orontes should have appeared 
as the representative of Syria. Politically, too, as 
well as by its natural features, it presented the chief 
point of contact, in later times, between this corner 
of Asia and the West. Near what may be called the 
turning-point of its course, where its spacious stream is 
diverted from advancing further northward by the chain 
of Am anus, the offshoot of the Taurus range, rose the 
Greek city of Antioch. Out of a vast square plain, the 
Orontes issues into a broad valley, opening seawards, but 
closed in on the north by Amanus, on the south by the 
rugged hills of the Casian range. These last, with the 
circuit of vast walls 1 that crown their heights, defended 
the city on one side, as the Orontes formed a natural 
moat on the other side in the level valley. All the 
cities in Palestine must have seemed mere villages or 
garrison towns in comparison with the size, the strength, 
and the beauty of this new capital. It has often been 
observed how the Christianity of the first ages throve in 
cities rather than in the country. So it was emphatically 
with “ the disciples who were first called Christians at 
Antioch/’ the capital of the East. From Antioch the 
river pursues its westerly course, and it is in this its last 
stage that the scenery occurs, which—by the wooded cliffs, 
the numerous windings, and the green spaces by the 
river side—has suggested the likeness of the English Wye. 
Enormous water-wheels, turned by the ample stream ; 
gardens, hedged in not by the usual fence of stiff prickly 
pear, but by plane and myrtle; the ground thickly 
studded with bay and oleander, as the river passes by 

1 It is this peculiarity in the situation and (in the shorter ends of the oblong 
of Antioch, with hills on one side and space) one leading up the valley (east- 
river on the other, which explains the ward), and two down the valley (west- 
apparent inconsistency noticed by ward). This remark, as well as the 
Gibbon between the vast extent of its general facts selected as characteristic 
walls and the small number of its of the Orontes and Antioch, which I 
gates. The five gates were, one barring was unable to visit, I owe to tb e ac- 
the only pass into the hills, one com- curate observation of my friend and 
manding the bridge across the river; fellow-traveller, Mr. Fremantle. 



LEBANON —DAMASCUS. 


401 


the probable site of Daphne—these are some of the 
features which distinguish the scenery of the Orontes 
from the usual imagery of the East. 

IV. The Leontes and Orontes are unknown, Baalbec and 
Antioch all but unknown, to the earlier history of the 
Jewisli people. But when we turn eastward we find our¬ 
selves once more on well-known ground. There is no 
portion of Syria where the history is so dependent on the 
geography as that which hangs on the fourth river of 
Lebanon, now called “ Barada,”—by the ancient Greeks 
“ Bardines” or “ Crysorrhoas;” by the Hebrews “ Abana” 
or “ Pharpaf.” The interior aspect of Damascus, however 
striking in itself, has often been described, and has no 
special bearing on the object of this volume. But its geo¬ 
graphical situation forcibly illustrates the characteristics 
of Oriental scenery, and well explains the reason why such 
a city must always have existed on the spot,—the first seat 
of man in leaving, the last on entering the wide Desert of 
the East . 1 

Damascus should be approached only one way, and that is 
from the west. The traveller who comes from that quarter passes 
over the great chain of Anti-Libanus; he crosses the watershed, 
and he finds himself following the course of a little stream flowing 
through a richly cultivated valley. This stream is the Barada. It 
flows on, and the cultivation which at its rise spreads far and wide 
along its banks, nourished by the rills which feed it, gradually is con¬ 
tracted within the limits of its single channel. The mountains rise 
round it absolutely bare. The peaks of Mount Sinai are not more 
sterile than these Syrian ranges. . . . But the river winds through 
them visible everywhere by its mass of vegetation—willow, poplars, 
hawthorn, walnut, hanging over a rushing volume of crystal water, 
—the more striking from the contrast of the naked Desert in which 
it is found. 

One of the strongest impressions left by the East is the con¬ 
nection—obvious enough in itself, but little thought of in Europe 
—between verdure and running water. But never—not even in 
the close juxtaposition of the Nile-valley and the sands of Africa— 

1 The course of the Barada is well in Hermon, and losing itself in a lake 
described by Mr. Porter (Journal of south of Damascus {ibid. v. 49—57), 
Sacred Literature, iv. 246—259). He as the Barada in two lakes east of 
identifies the Pharpar with the ’Awaj, Damascus {ibid. iv. 260). 
which he has also described ; as rising 


Lebanon in 
its relation 
to the 
Barada. 


Damascus. 


402 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


have I seen so wonderful a witness to this life-giving power, as 
the view on which we are now entering. The further we advance 
the contrast becomes more and more forcible; the mountains 
more bare, the green of the river-bed more deep and rich. At 
last a cleft opens in the rocky hills between two precipitous cliffs 
—up the side of one of these cliffs the road winds; on the summit 
of the cliff there stands a ruined chapel. Through the arches of 
that chapel, from the very edge of the mountain-range, you look 
down on the plain of Damascus. It is here seen in its widest and 
fullest perfection, with the visible explanation of the whole secret of 
its great and enduring charm, that which it must have had when it 
was the solitary seat of civilisation in Syria, and which it will have 
as long as the world lasts. The river is visible at the bottom with 
its green banks, rushing through the cleft; it bursts forth, 1 and as 
if in a moment scatters over the plain, through a circle of thirty 
miles, the same verdure which had hitherto been confined to its 
single channel. It is like the bursting of a shell—the eruption of 
a volcano—but an eruption not of death but of life. Tar and 
wide in front extends the wide plain, its horizon bare, its lines of 
surrounding hills bare, all bare far away on the road to Palmyra 
and Bagdad. In the midst of this plain lies at your feet the vast 
lake or island of deep verdure, walnuts and apricots waving above, 
corn and grass below; and in the midst of this mass of foliage 
rises, striking out its white arms of streets hither and thither, and 
its white minarets above the trees which embosom them, the City of 
Damascus. On the right towers the snowy'height of Hermon, over¬ 
looking the whole scene. Close behind are the sterile limestone 
mountains—so that you stand literally between the living and the 
dead. And the ruined arches of the ancient chapel, which serve as 
a centre and framework to the prospect and retrospect, still pre¬ 
serve the magnificent story which, whether truth or fiction, is well 
worthy of this sublime view. Here, hard by the sacred heights of 
Salehiyeh—consecrated by the caverns and tombs of a thousand 
Mussulman saints—the Prophet is said to have stood, whilst yet a 
camel-driver from Mecca, and after gazing on the scene below, to 
have turned away without entering the city. “ Man,” he said, “ can 
have but one paradise—and my paradise is fixed above.” 2 . . . 


1 The origin of Damascus, as thus 
depending on this rush of many waters, 
is well expressed in the legendary 
account, said to have been given by 
El-Khudr, the Ancient Wanderer of the 
Mussulman religion. “Once,” he said, 
“ I passed by and saw the site of this 
city all covered by the sea : wherein 
was an abundance of water collected. 
After this I was absent five hundred 


years, and then returning, beheld a 
city commenced therein, where many 
were walking about.” (Jelal-ed-din, p. 
486.) 

2 Maundrell: Early Travellers, p.485. 
The chapel is called “ Kubbet-en- 
Nasar/’—“the Dome of Victory.” 
According to one version of the story it 
is said to be the grave of the Prophet’s 
guide, who said, “Here let me die.” (See 





LEBANON—DAMASCUS. 


403 


One other traditional view there is on the opposite side of 
Damascus, which though nearer at hand and only seen from the level 
ground, is, if correct, yet more memorable—the most memorable, 
indeed, which even this world-old city has presented to mortal eyes. 
A quarter of an hour from the walls of the city on the eastern side 
the Christian burial-ground, and a rude mass of conglomerate stone 
mark the reputed scene of the conversion of St. Paul. We were 
there “at noon.” There was the cloudless blue sky overhead; close 
in front the city walk, in part still ancient; around it, the green 
mass of groves and orchards; and beyond them, and deeply con¬ 
trasted T\ith them, on the south, the white top of Hermon, on the 
north, the gray hills of Saalyah. Such, according to the local 
belief, was St. Patti's view when the light became darkness 
before him, and he heard the voice which turned the fortunes of 
mankind. 


NOTE A. 

ON THE TRADITIONAL LOCALITIES OF DAMASCUS. 

In the above description of Damascus, I have ventured to allude 
to the two traditional views which must occur to every one in ap¬ 
proaching Damascus, as fitly closing the long succession of celebrated 
prospects, which form so remarkable a series of links between the 
history and geography of the Holy Land. But the two spots in 
question must be considered, historically, as more than doubtful. 

Mahomet probably never reached Damascus at all in his early 
wanderings; and the story seems, like many others relating to the 
neighbourhood, to have been only an expression of the strong sense 
of the beauty of the scene. With regard to the conversion of St. 
Paul, " as he drew nigh to Damascus,” it is not likely that the exact’ 
scene should have been preserved; and it is curious that no less than 
four 1 distinct spots have been pointed out at different times along the 
road to Damascus, at a greater or less distance, within ten miles 
from the city. Of these four spots, the only one now remembered 
seems to be that which has just been mentioned. And even of this, 
the tradition is only retained in the Latin convent. The ignorant 
guides of the place point it out only as the place where St. Paul hid 
himself after his escape, and all memory of the Vision and Con¬ 
version is lost . 2 After all, it is most probable that the Apostle's 


a very inaccurate work, but with 
a few shreds of information. (Yussuf, 
p. 253). On nearly the same point, is 
laid the scene of Abraham’s celebrated 
view of the rising and setting of the 
sun, the moon, and the stars, which 
occasioned his abandonment of idolatry. 
(Ritter, 1299.) 


1 Quaresmius, vol. ii. 874. 

2 There is a confused Mahometan tra¬ 
dition which represents our Lord as 
having ascended from the Mount of Olives 
at Jerusalem, and descended on the Mount 
of Fi;js at Damascus. (Jelal-ed-din, 
pp. 152, 397.) Can this be an allusion 
to the vision of St. Paul ? 

D d 2 




404 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


approach to Damascus was not on the eastern side of the city at all. 
“ The road to Jerusalem” then, as now, would have most naturally 
brought him into the city by the southern gate, that now called “ the 
Gate of God;” or the western gate, leading to the heights of Saalyeh. 
The other localities in connection with St. Paul's history in Damascus 
are not more authentic. There is a long wide thoroughfare, called 
by the guides “ Straight,”—but the name by which it is commonly 
known is the Street of “ Bazaars.” Two houses are shown in diffe¬ 
rent quarters of the city; one, as that of Ananias; the other (not in 
the aforesaid street), as that of Judas. 1 Both are reverenced by 
Mussulmans, as well as by Christians. 

At the distance of two miles outside the walls, is shown a spot 
doubly connected with the history of the Old Testament. It is the 
village of Hobah, said to be that to which Abraham pursued the 
kings. (Gen. xiv. 15.) The only place in it now visited is the 
synagogue. In the corner of the building is a hole, entered by 
steps, long worn away, said to have been the retreat of Elisha. 
It is still frequented by sick pilgrims, who “ come and sleep, and rise 
the next morning well.” In the centre of the church is a space 
enclosed within rails,—formerly said to mark the place of Hazael’s 
coronation,—but now called the grave of Elisha’s servant (evidently 
meaning Geliazi), who died here^ aged 120, and over whose grave 
this railing was erected to prevent the burial of another on the 
same spot. 


NOTE B. 

TRADITIONS OF THE PATRIARCHAL HISTORY IN THE 
LEBANON. 

There is no neighbourhood more fertile in the stories of the 
primeval history of mankind than that of Damascus. The red 
colour of the plain on which it stands has long been represented as 
the pure earth from which the first man—the red f Adam 9 —was 
formed. 2 The hills on the northern extremity of the plain have been 
long pointed out as the scene of the death of Abel. 3 The cedars of 
Lebanon, even as far back as the time of Ezekiel, were thought to 
grow in “ Eden.” 4 The rude tomb, called “ of Nimrod,” is shown at 


1 The “house of Ananias” is not re¬ 
markable; that of “Judas” contains a 
square room with a stone floor, one por¬ 
tion partly walled off for a tomb, which 
is covered with the usual votive offerings 
of shawls. This is probably what Maun- 
drell (Early Trav. 494) called the tomb 
of Ananias. This house, and the im¬ 


probability of the tradition, is well de¬ 
scribed in Pococke, (ii. 119). It stands in 
a short wide street, called the “Sheikh’s 
Place,” with a mosque hard by. 

2 Maundrell, 490. 

3 See Jelal-ed-din, 427. 

4 Ezek. xxxi. 9, 16, 18. 




LEBANON—DAMASCUS. 


405 


Kefr Hawy, on the summit of the Pass of Hermon, between Banias 
and Damascus. 

In regard to three such localities, often glanced at by passing 
travellers, the following additions and corrections may be worth 
preserving. 

1. Following the course of the Barada up through the mountains 
of Anti-Libanus, the pathway at last reaches a narrow defile, through 
which the river rushes in a roaring torrent. This pass is called the 
“ Shukh Barada," or “El Goosh,”—“Cleft of the Barada” or of 
the “ Old Woman.” It is crossed by a single arch, called the Bridge 
of “ Souk,” or “ Shukh.” High up in the rocks, on the left bank, 
are tombs and broken columns in front. On the right bank ..rises a 
lofty hill, on whose summit, as you approach from the south-east, 
is seen a line of tall black trees. They are seven “ Sindians,” or 
Syrian oaks; and the following is the story told us concerning 
them by a native of Zebdani, a village, situated two or three 
hours to the north-west of the pass, where we encamped that night. 
“Habid (Cain) and Habil (Abel) were the two sons of Adam. The 
whole world was divided between them; and this was the cause of 
their quarrel. Habil moved his boundary stones too far; Habid 
threw them at him; and Habil fell. His brother in great grief 
carried the body on his back for 500 years, not knowing what to 
do with it. At last, on the top of this hill, he saw two birds fighting, 
—the one killed the other, washed him, and buried him in the ground. 
Habid did the like for his brother's body, and planted his staff to 
mark the spot, and from this staff the seven trees grew up.” 

At the top of the hill, under the trees, is said to be a large tomb 
of “ Nebi-Habil.” At the entrance of the pass stood, in ancient 
times, the city of Abila, the capital of Abilene. It is difficult to say 
whether the name originated the legend, or the legend the name; 
probably the former, as the word “Abil,” (meadow), would be 
a natural designation of a town at the exit of the Barada through 
the green vale at the foot of the defile, and the same transposition of 
“ Abel ” into “ Abila,” under like circumstances, occurs in the town 
of Abel-Shittim. The pass was the scene of a great battle in the 
time of the Mussulman conquest of Syria. 1 

2. The same peasant of Zebdani conducted us over the western 
slopes of Anti-Libanus to the tomb of Nebi-Schit—“ The Prophet 
Seth.” It stands conspicuous on the side of the hill, with its two 
white domes, just where the great view of Ccele-Syria opens in the 
descent. Bound it lies the village which derives its name from the 
sanctuary. The larger of the two domes marks the mosque; the 
lesser the tomb, which joins it at an obtuse angle. We entered 
through a court, accompanied by two servants of the mosque. The 

1 See Mr. Porter’s account of the Barada (Journal of Sacred Lit. iv. pp. 248—252.) 




406 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


tomb was seen through a rough grating. It was a gallery, like a 
long low chest, covered, as usual, with offerings for a length of 
60 feet. “ It would have been 20 feet longer,” said the attendant, 
“but the Prophet Seth, who came here preaching to the people, 
who worshipped cows, was killed by them, and was hastily buried, 
with his knees doubled under his legs. Every Eriday night a light 
shines in the tomb.” 1 

3. On the opposite side of the vale of Ccele-Syria, or the eastern 
slope of Lebanon, and therefore nearly facing the tomb of Seth, 
immediately close to the village of Muallakah, is the similar mosque 
of Nebi-Nuach—the “Prophet Noah;” though smaller, and appa¬ 
rently less honoured. He having died a natural death, and been 
therefore buried at peace, the tomb was proportionally longer than 
that of Seth, being nearly 120 feet in length. 2 


1 Compare Note to Chapter VI. p. 272. 

2 Early travellers were told that the 
ark was built here. (Brocquiere : Early 
Travellers, p. 293). It is curious that 
the statements respecting the measure¬ 


ments of this tomb should be so various. 
Burckhardt gives it at only ten feet (p. 5). 
The most accurate account is in Lepsius’ 
Letters, who visited both tombs (pp. 338, 
345). 


< • 



CHAPTER XIII 




THE GOSPEL HISTORY AND TEACHING, VIEWED IN CONNECTION 
WITH THE LOCALITIES OF PALESTINE. 


General connection.—I. The stages of the History. 1. Infancy. 2. Youth. 
3. Public ministry. 4. Retirement from public ministry.—II. The 
Parables. 1. Parables of Judaea. (a). The Vineyards. ( b ). The 
Fig-trees, (c). The Shepherd. ( d ). The Good Samaritan. 2. Parables 
of Galilee, (a). The corn-fields. (&). The birds, (c). The fisheries. 
III. The Discourses—The Sermon on the Mount. 1. The city on the 
hill. 2. The birds and the flowers. 3. The torrent.—IV. Conclusion. 
1. Reality of the teaching. 2. Homeliness and universality. 3. 
Union of human and divine. 





THE GOSPEL HISTORY AND TEACHING 


IN CONNECTION WITH 

THE LOCALITIES OF PALESTINE. 


It might be supposed from the much greater extent of 
history, and the much greater variety of detail in the Old 
Testament than in the New, that the Old, much rather 
than the New, would be constantly present to the mind of 
a traveller in Palestine. But this is not the case. Pro¬ 
bably all travellers would bear witness how, from one end 
of the country to the other, the Gospel history was never 
absent; how, whenever the recollections of the Old and 
of the New Testament came into collision, the former at 
once gave way. Of course, this feeling is in a great 
measure to be accounted for by the stronger hold which 
the New Testament possesses over European minds through 
its greater intrinsic importance, and through our more 
complete familiarity with its details. But it is not only 
this. The sight of the country brings forcibly before us 
the fact that the Gospel history, interwoven as it is with 
the same imagery and the same natural features, is the 
completion and close, without which the earlier history 
would be left imperfect. And if in these concluding 
scenes the glimpses allowed are fewer and shorter, yet this 
is compensated by the vividness and clearness of the 
recognition. It is like travelling in the night. Whole 
tracts are traversed with no other consciousness of identity 
with former events, than is given by the knowledge that 
we are treading the same ground and breathing the same 
air. Suddenly a flash of lightning comes, and for an 
instant tower, and tree, and field are seen as distinctly and 
as unmistakeably as in the broad daylight. 




THE GOSPEL HISTORY AND TEACHING. 


409 


I. In regard to the Gospel History, as distinct from 
the Parables and Discourses, the special events have been 
sufficiently dwelt upon in connection with their separate 
localities. What is here proposed is to view them in con¬ 
nection with each other, and with the history as a whole. 

1. The Infancy of Christ embraces two localities, Beth¬ 
lehem and Egypt. Of these the notices are so slight 
in the Gospel narratives as hardly to leave a trace on the 
subsequent history. Egypt is never again mentioned; 
Bethlehem only once, or at most twice, and then doubtfully 
and obscurely. But in the legends of the Apocryphal 
Gospels, local circumstances of each event are there un¬ 
folded in the utmost detail, and the spots indicated—the 
sycomore at Heliopolis, and the grotto at Bethlehem— 
are those still pointed out. The fact is worth notice, as 
showing that the Apocryphal rather than the Canonical 
Gospels, are the real sources of the earliest local traditions ; 1 
and that in this, probably, lies their chief historical im¬ 
portance. 

2. The connected history of Christ begins with Naza¬ 
reth. He appeared, not as the Prophet of Bethlehem, but 
as the Prophet of Nazareth. Nazareth was accordingly 
the centre, from and to which He came and returned, on 
the two only occasions when we read of His emerging 
from that secluded basin, before He finally left it for His 
public ministry. When He went up with His parents to 
the Passover, the caravan must in all probability have 
followed the course of the Roman road by Scythopolis 
and Neapolis, and then for the first time He saw the 
interior of Palestine. The one or two days’ journey from 
Nazareth to Bethabara, either by Scythopolis or by the 
bridge at the foot of the Lake of Galilee, must have intro¬ 
duced Him for the first time to the wild scenery of the 
Jordan-valley, and of its eastern Desert. 2 

3. Amongst the various questions which come before 
the student of Scripture, few are of greater interest than 
to ascertain the principle of the differences between the 
earlier and the latest of the Evangelists. The inward 


The stages 
of the 
History. 


The 

Infancy. 


The Youth. 


The Public 
Ministry. 


See Chapter XIV. 


2 See Chapters VII. and X. 





410 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


differences of style and character cannot be here con¬ 
sidered. But the outward difference of arrangement has 
been evidently,—if not occasioned, at any rate influenced, 
by local considerations. The three first Gospels turn 
almost entirely on the ministrations in Galilee ; the 
Gospel of St. John turns almost entirely on the ministra¬ 
tions in Judaea. If the reader takes the Gospels of St. 
Matthew, St. Mark, and St. Luke, he would hardly be 
aware, till he approached the final chapters, that Judaea 
was in existence. If he takes the Gospel of St. John, he 
will find that, although Galilee is mentioned from time 
to time, yet it is always as the exception, not the rule; 
in three chapters only out of the twenty which form the 
regular narrative, always with a reason, almost an excuse, 
for the retirement from the sphere of His labours, “ in 
Judaea,” “amongst the Jews,” “at Jerusalem.” Galilee 
and Judaea are opposed to each other, as two distinct coun¬ 
tries, rather than as two provinces of the same country. 
How it was that these Galilean and Judaean cycles of his¬ 
tory are represented in the respective narratives, as thus 
independent of each other, perhaps it is not possible to 
determine; but the marked distinction between the two 
spheres is common to both systems of narrative. It is 
not more extraordinary that St. John should speak of 
Galilee as thus separate in race and interests from Judaea, 
than that the Three Evangelists should speak of the passage 
into Judaea as a marked and exceptional departure from 
the ministrations of Galilee, as the turning-point of the 
history, the crossing, if one may so speak, of the Rubicon 
of Palestine. This distinction between Judaea and Galilee 
is, as we have seen, founded in the facts of the country. 
That broad separation 1 which from the earliest times existed 
between the fortunes of the Four Northern Tribes and 
those of the south, at the time of the Christian era, was 
still further increased through the occupation of the inter¬ 
vening country of Samaria by a hostile sect. Any one 
who took either Judaea or Galilee as the point of view from 
which to regard the rest of Palestine, would naturally look 


1 See Chapter X. 


THE GOSPEL HISTORY AND TEACHING. 


411 


on the other as remote and separate from that of which he 
was writing. If then (for whatever reason), the range 
of the Evangelists' vision was confined to the sphere 
respectively of the north, and of the south,—of the lake 
and the mountains, and the wild peasantry, on the one 
hand,—of the city and the Temple, and the cultivated 
Jews on the other,—some, at least, of the divergences 
and omissions in the two sets of narratives are explained. 
The demoniacs, who, even as late as the third century, 
peculiarly infested the shores of the Galilean lake, would 
naturally find no place in the Gospel of St. John. The 
raising of Lazarus in Judaea would find no place in the 
Gospels of the earlier three. 

4. Galilee and Judaea were the chief, but not the only 
scenes of our Lord's ministration. Of the transient pas¬ 
sages through the intervening tract of Samaria, nothing 
more can be added to what has been already said of the one 
remarkable halt at Shechem or Neapolis. 1 Three distinct 
occasions, however, occur when, partly from the hostility, 
partly from the excitement, of the popular mind, Christ 
was compelled to retire into the less frequented parts of 
Palestine, and where, accordingly, the local sphere is 
enlarged. The first of these occasions was when John 
was beheaded, when many of the disciples turned away 
from Him,—when the first approach of His end dawned 
upon Him and upon them,—after the feeding of the multi¬ 
tudes on the sea of Galilee. The eastern shores of the 
lake—the limits of the Holy Land towards the west, 
on the boundaries of Tyre and Sidon,—and far away to 
the north, the villages of Caesarea Philippi,—for this 
period of His life, and for no other, are seen by glimpses 
only, yet still distinctly, in the Gospel narratives. 2 The 
second occasion of such danger is that mentioned in the 
Fourth Gospel,—when He encountered the same hostility 
at Jerusalem as He had before encountered in Galilee. 
And here again, the scene of His retirement is in accord¬ 
ance with what might have been expected. What the 
northern and western mountains of Galilee were to that 


1 See Chapter V. 


2 See Chapters VI. X. XI. 


The re¬ 
tirement 
from the 
Public 
Ministry. 




412 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


The 

Parables. 


The Pa¬ 
rables of 
Jutkea. 

(a). The 
Vineyard. 


province, Persea and the Jordan-valley were to Judsea. 
“Beyond Jordan” “He abode,”—or “at Ephraim,”—the 
high village on the outskirts of the hills of Benjamin, 
“near,” and overhanging, “the wilderness” of the Jordan, 
continued with His disciples, “walking no more openly 
amongst the Jews.” 1 And with these notices in St. John 
agrees the statement in St. Matthew’s Gospel, that in the 
last period of His life, before His final entrance into Jeru¬ 
salem, He “came into the coasts of Judaea beyond 
Jordan,”—and with both of these statements agrees the 
narrative of all the Four, which makes that final approach 
to have been—not from the usual northern road through 
Samaria,—but from Jericho. 

II. It has been thought worth while, at the risk of some 
repetition, briefly to bring together the general framework 
of the Gospel History, partly as a means of testing its 
general truth, partly as a help, though slight, to find our 
way through the confusion of time and place in which, 
three at least of the narratives are involved. 

But there remains a greater interest. Every traveller 
in Palestine has recognised the truth of what every com¬ 
mentator has conjectured from the likelihood of the 
case,—the suggestion of the imagery of the Parables, by 
what may still be seen passing before the eye of the spec¬ 
tator of those scenes. Let us now collect together all 
these instances, and observe what light they throw upon 
the place, or the mode, of the teaching of which they 
formed the framework. 

The first Parable that rises before the mind of the 
traveller as he enters Judaea from the Desert, is that of the 
vineyard. “ There was a certain householder who planted 
a vineyard, and set a ‘wall 5 around it, and digged a wine¬ 
press, and built a tower.” 2 It is one of the few instances— 
perhaps the only one—in which an image of the Old 
Testament is almost exactly repeated in the discourses of 
Christ.—The “ song of my beloved,” 3 —the vineyard in 
a hill, the horn of oil, 4 with “the wall,” “the stones 

1 See Chapter VII. 3 Isa. v. 1, 2. 

2 Matt. xxi. 33 ; Mark xii. 1. See 4 Heb. for ‘ a very fruitful hill.’ See 

Chap. I. Part II. p. 103. margin of English Bible. 


THE GOSPEL HISTORY AND TEACHING. 


413 


gathered out,” “ the vine of Sorek, 1 the tower in the 
midst of it,” and “ the winepress,”—are common to the 
Gospel-Parables, and to the Prophecies of Isaiah. Of 
both, an equal illustration is preserved in what has been 
before described as one of the main characteristics of the 
southern scenery of Palestine,—the enclosures of loose 
stone, like the walls of fields in Derbyshire or Westmore¬ 
land, which, with the square gray tower at the corner of 
each, catch the eye on the bare slopes of Hebron, of 
Bethlehem, and of Olivet,—at first sight hardly distin¬ 
guishable from the ruins of ancient churches or fortresses, 
which lie equally scattered over the hills of Judaea. 

To a certain extent, the number of vineyards now seen 
in the south, must be ascribed to the fact, that in the 
southern towns is to be found the greatest amount of 
Christian or Jewish population, who alone can properly 
cultivate what is to Mussulmans a forbidden fruit. But 
it has been already shown that Judah 2 must always have 
been the chief seat of the vine in Palestine. And thus 
the past history of the nation concurs with our own 
present experience in pointing to what was one of the 
most obvious and familiar images of Palestine at the time 
when the Parables were delivered, of which no less than 
five have relation to vineyards,—that of the labourers, 
that of the fig-tree, that of the husbandman, that of the 
two sons, and that of the true vine. 

Of the two first the scene is doubtful. The Parable 
of the labourers was, if we can trust the order in which 
it occurs, spoken in Peraea. In the dearth of modern 
information on those parts it is useless to speculate. 
But the vineyards of Moab were famous in former days. 3 
The Parable of “the fig-tree” is one amongst many, 
of which the place is left wholly uncertain. Yet, placed 
as it is, in close juxta-position with the story of the 
massacre of the Galileans in the Temple, and the fall of 
the tower of Siloam,—it is natural to connect it with 
Jerusalem. The peculiarity of the image—that of a 

1 Heb. for ‘ the choicest vine.’ pare Numb. xxi. 22, and Josh. xiii. 19 

2 See Chapter III. (Sibmah). Buckingham (c. 4,) speaks 

3 j sa> xv j. &—10; Jer.xlviii. 32. Com- of the vineyards at Anab, near Ammon. 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


414 


Jig-tree in a vineyard ,—however unlike to the European 
notion of a mass of unbroken vine-clad hills, is natural 
in Palestine, where, whether in corn-fields or vineyards, 
fig-trees, thorn trees, apple trees, are allowed to grow 
freely wherever they can get soil to support them. 

But of the three remaining Parables of this class, the 
place can hardly be doubted. If, as the narrative implies, 
the Parables of the two sons and of the husbandmen were 
spoken in the courts of the Temple, the Mount of 
Olivet, with the evening light resting on those ancient 
towers and enclosures of vineyards, which mark its long 
slopes, was immediately in view to point and to enliven the 
story. If, as has been often conjectured, the Parable of 
the True Vine 1 was spoken after they had risen from the 
Supper, and passed out into the night air ; then again, the 
vine might be at hand, either on the moonlit sides of 
Olivet, or else, perhaps, creeping round the court of the 
house where they were assembled. 

(6). The Mount Olivet, besides its abundance of olives, is still 

Fig-tree, sprinkled with fig-trees. Bethphage possibly derives its 
name from this circumstance. 2 One allusion to these fig-trees 
has been already noticed. There are two others, and they 
are indisputably connected with Olivet. One is the parable 
not spoken, but acted, with regard to the fig-tree, which, 
when all the others around it were, as they are still, bare 
at the beginning of April, was alone clothed with its broad 
green leaves, though without the corresponding fruit. Fig- 
trees may still be seen overhanging the ordinary road from 
Jerusalem to Bethany, growing out of the rocks of the 
solid “ mountain,” 3 which might, by the prayer of faith, 
be removed, and cast into the distant Mediterranean “sea.” 
On Olivet, too, the brief parable in the great prophecy was 
spoken, when He pointed to the bursting buds of spring in 
the same trees, as they grew around Him :—“ Behold the 
fig-tree and all the trees—when th eynow shoot forth—when 
his branch is yet tender and putteth forth leaves, ye see and 
know of your own selves that summer is now nigh at hand/' 4 


verse, “ Arise, let us go hence.” 


1 John, xv. 1. Compare the preceding 

!l*Se_ “ Arisf* lef. ns crn ” 


3 Matt. xxi. 21. 

4 Luke xxi. 29, 30. Matt. xxiv. 


Arise, iet us go nen 
2 See Chapter III. p. 184. 


32. 


THE GOSPEL HISTORY AND TEACHING. 


415 


Another image which, whatever may have been the case (c). The 
formerly, is now seen again and again in the immediate She P herd - 
vicinity of Jerusalem, 1 is that of the shepherds leading over 
the hills their flocks of sheep and goats,—of white sheep 
and of black goats intermingled on the mountain-side, 
yet by their colour at once distinguishable from each 
other. The “ shepherds,” we know, “ abode with their 
flocks,” 2 at that time, at least within a few miles of Jeru¬ 
salem ; it is possible that even then, when the Mount 
of Olives must have been much more thickly set with 
trees and enclosures, such a flock may have wandered up 
the sides of the hill, and suggested to Him who was sitting 
there with His disciples over against the Temple, the scene 
of the Shepherd of Mankind dividing the parts of that vast 
flock, each from each, the sheep on His right hand, and the 
goats on His left. 3 There is also one other parable of this 
class, of which the scene, though not so distinctly specified, 
is yet placed close to Jerusalem. It was whilst he was 
conversing with the excommunicated blind man, not within 
the Temple courts, and, therefore, probably in His other 
usual resort, on Olivet, that he addressed to the Pharisees 
the parable of the Good Shepherd. 4 The sheepfold on 
the slope of the hill—the wicket-gate—the keeper of the 
gate—the sheep, as in all southern countries, following, 
not preceding, the shepherd whose voice they hear—may 
have been present to His mind then, as in the later para¬ 
ble ; and thus ft may have been the same outward scene 
which suggested the image of the mild and beneficent 
Guardian and of the stern and awful Judge of the human 


race. 

There is yet another parable, drawn from the shepherd- 
life of Palestine, of which, however, both the context and 
its own contents carry us away from Judaea. The indica¬ 
tions of the scene of the Lost Sheep are indefinite, yet 
both in St. Luke and in St. Matthew, the last preceding 


1 Matt. xxv. 32. I cannot now call 
to mind how frequently they occurred 
in other parts of Palestine. Doubtless 
in the great plains of the north and 
west we must have met them. But in 
Central Palestine I recall them only in 


the wild uplands above Bethany, and 
on the slopes of Olivet above the 
Kedron. 

2 Luke ii. 8. 

3 Matt. xxv. 32,33. 

4 John x. 1—14. 




416 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


(d). The 
Good Sama¬ 
ritan. 


note of place connects it 1 2 with Galilee. But the combined 
description of the pastures “ in the wilderness 552 and “ on 
the mountains ” 3 can hardly find any position in Palestine, 
precisely applicable, except the “ mountainous country ” or 
“ wilderness, 5 '’ so often called by these names, on the east 
of the Jordan. The shepherd of that touching parable 
thus becomes the successor of the wild herdsmen of the 
trans-Jordanic tribes, who wandered far and wide over 
those free and open hills,—the last relics of the patriarchal 
state of their ancestors . 4 

The previous context 5 of “ the Good Samaritan ” would 
probably lead us to connect its delivery with Galilee. 
But the immediately succeeding context naturally brings 
us into Bethany . 6 In this case, the story may have been 
spoken on the spot which must certainly have suggested 
it. There we see the long descent of three thousand 
feet, by which the traveller “ went down” from Jeru¬ 
salem on its high table-land, to Jericho in the Jordan- 
valley. There the last traces of cultivation and habitation, 
after leaving Bethany, vanish away, and leave him in a 
wilderness as bare and as solitary as the Desert of Arabia. 
Up from the valley of the Jordan below, or from the 
caves in the overhanging mountains around him, issue the 
Bedouin robbers, who from a very early time gave this road 
a proverbial celebrity for its deeds of blood , 7 and who now 
make it impossible for even the vast host of pilgrims to 
descend to the Jordan without a Turkish guard. Sharp 
turns of the road, projecting spurs of rock, everywhere 
facilitate the attack and escape of the plunderers. They 
seize upon the traveller and strip him, as is still the 


1 Matt. xvii. 24; xix. 1. Lukexiii. 31. 

2 Luke xv. 4. 

3 Matt, xviii. 12. 

4 See Chapter VIII. 

5 Luke x. 13—15. 

6 Luke x. 38. 

7 The pass seems to be that called in 
Joshua, xv. 7 ; xviii. 17, the “ ‘ ascent 
of’ Adummim.” This name is explained 
by Jerome (De Locis Hebraicis, in voce 
Adummim) to allude to the blood “ qui 
in illo loco a latronibus funditur.” That 
this may be the sense of Adummim is 
clear from Isaiah lxiii. 2, where the 


same word is used for the blood-stained 
garments of the conqueror from 
Edom (see, too, 2 Kings, iii. 22); and, 
at any rate, Jerome’s testimony to 
the fact of the robbers is important. 
But the more natural meaning of the 
word is “ the Pass of the Bed-haired 
men,” as if alluding to some Arab tribe; 
and so the LXX take it, avafiacris nvpfxcv. 
It may be worth while to mention that 
there are no red rocks, as some have 
fancied, in order to make out a deriva¬ 
tion. The whole pass is white lime¬ 
stone. 


THE GOSPEL HISTORY AND TEACHING. 


417 


custom of their descendants in like case; they beat him 
severely, and leave him naked and bleeding under the 
fierce sun reflected from the white glaring mountains, to 
die, unless some unexpected aid arrives. “By chance,” 
“ by a coincidence of circumstances ” 1 that could hardly 
be looked for, the solitude of the road is on the day 
of this adventure broken by three successive travellers 
ascending or descending the toilsome height. The first 
who came was, like the previous traveller, on his way 
from the capital,—a priest, probably going to the great 
sacerdotal station in Jericho. The road, as it winds 
amongst the rocky hills where the traveller is thus ex¬ 
posed, rises usually into a higher pathway, immediately 
above the precipitous descent on the left hand. The 
priest “ saw ”—no one on that long descent could fail to 
see, even from a distance—the wounded man lying by the 
rocky roadside, and he turned up on the high pathway and 
passed him by. The next was a Levite, coming or going 
between the two priestly cities, and he, when he reached 
the spot, also cast a momentary glance of compassion 
at the stranger, and climbed the pathway and went 
forward. The third was one of the hated race, who 
was not more solitary here in this wild Desert than he 
would have been in the crowded streets of Jerusalem. 
He, too, mounted on his ass or mule, came close to the 
fatal spot, saw the stranger, bound up the wounds, placed 
him on his own beast, and brought him before evening to 
a caravanserai,—such an one as still exists like a rude 
Hospice on the mountain-side, about half-way between 
Jerusalem and Jericho,—and on the morning left him 
there to be cared for till he should himself return to 
Jerusalem. Such is the outward story, truly the product 
of one of the most peculiar scenes of Judaea, yet which has 
now spread through a range as vast as its own wide scope 
—the consolation of the wanderer and the sufferer, of 
the outcast and the heretic, in every age and in every 
country. 

2. From the cycle of parables in Judaea, we pass to those 


Kara o’vyKvp'iav. Luke x. 31. 


E E 




418 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


The Pa¬ 
rables of 
Galilee. 


The Corn¬ 
fields. 


in Galilee. Of these, the greater part are grouped in the 
discourse from the fishing-vessel off the beach of the Plain 
of Gennesareth. Is there anything on the spot to suggest 
the images thus conveyed ? So, (if I may speak for a 
moment of myself,) I asked, as I rode along the track 
under the hillside, by which the Plain of Gennesareth is 
approached. So I asked, at the moment seeing nothing 
but the steep sides of the hill alternately of rock and grass. 
And when I thought of the parables of the sower, I 
answered, that here at least was nothing on which the ; 
Divine Teaching could fasten. It must have been the 
distant corn-fields of Samaria or Esdraelon on which His 
mind was dwelling. The thought had hardly occurred 
to me, when a slight recess in the hillside, close upon the 
plain, disclosed at once, in detail, and with a conjunction 
which I remember nowhere else in Palestine, every feature 
of the great parable. There was the undulating corn¬ 
field descending to the water’s edge. There was the < 
trodden pathway running through the midst of it, with no 
fence or hedge to prevent the seed from falling here and 
there on either side of it, or upon it; itself hard with the 
constant tramp of horse and mule, and human feet. There 
was the “ good ” rich soil, which distinguishes the whole j 
of that plain and its neighbourhood from the bare hills 
elsewhere descending into the lake, and which, where 
there is no interruption, produces one vast mass of corn. 
There was the rocky ground of the hillside protruding 
here and there through the corn-fields, as elsewhere ; 
through the grassy slopes. There were the large bushes 
of thorn—the “ Nabk,” that kind of which tradition says : 
that the Crown of Thorns was woven,—springing up, like 
the fruit-trees of the more inland parts, in the very midst 
of the waving wheat. 1 

This is the most detailed illustration of any of the 
Galilean parables. But the image of corn-fields gene¬ 
rally must have been always present to the eye of the 
multitudes on shore,—of the Master and disciples in the 
boat,—as constantly as the vineyards at Jerusalem. “ The 
earth bringing forth fruit of itself,”—“ the blade, the ear, 


1 See Chapter X. 



THE GOSPEL HISTORY AND TEACHING. 


419 


the full corn in the ear,” 1 —“ the reapers coming with their 
sickles 2 for the harvest,” 3 could never be out of place in 
the Plain of Gennesareth. And it is probable that these 
corn-fields would always have exhibited the sight which 
has been observed in the plains of the Upper Jordan 
beyond the Lake of Merom, and in the great corn-fields of 
Samaria, 4 —women and children employed in picking out 
from the wheat the tall green stalks, still called by the 
Arabs “ Zuw&n,” apparently the same word as “ Zizania ,” 5 
which, in the Vulgate, is rendered “ Lollia,” in our version 
“ tares,” 6 and which, it can easily be imagined, if sowed 
designedly throughout the fields, would be inseparable from 
the wheat, from which, even when growing naturally, and 
by chance, they are at first sight hardly distinguishable. 

Of the rest of the imagery in that series of parables, it 
is perhaps not necessary to speak. Yet the countless 
birds of all kinds, aquatic fowls by the lake-side, par¬ 
tridges and pigeons hovering, as on the Nile-bank, over 
the rich plain, immediately recall the “ birds of the air ” 7 
which “ came and devoured the seed by the way side,” 8 
or which took refuge in the spreading branches of the 
mustard tree . 9 It is impossible to see even the relics of 


1 Mark iv. 28. 

2 Mark iv. 29. 

3 Matth. xiii. 80, 39, 41. 

4 Dr. Wilson (Lands of the Bible) 
describes this sight in the former 
locality. I saw it in the latter. 

5 The Arabic word Zuwan is derived 
from Z^n, “nausea.” (i£dviov is found 
no where but in the New Testament, 
and in the ecclesiastical writers who 
have probably derived it from thence. 

6 Matth. xiii. 25—30, 36—40. 

7 Math. vi. 26.—See Chapter X. 

8 Matth. xiii. 4 ; Luke viii. 5. 

9 Matth. xiii. 31, 32; Mark iv. 31; 
Luke xiii. 19. What precise tree is 
meant by the mustard-tree (ahum), is 
hardly determined sufficiently. But an 
able article by Professor Royle (Journal 
of Royal Asiatic Society, No. xv. p.113), 
goes far to identify it with the Salva- 
dora Persica; called in Arabic Khadel , 
in Hebrew Chardal, in the north-west 
of India Khardel, and, therefore, appa¬ 
rently the same as a Ivan i, which, in the 
Syriac version, is translated Khardel. 


It is said to grow in the neighbourhood 
of Damascus and Jerusalem, on the 
shores of the Dead Sea, in the Valley of 
the Jordan, and on the shores of the Lake 
of Gennesareth. He thus winds up his 
argument: “We have in it a small 
seed, which, sown in cultivated ground, 
abounds in foliage. This being pun¬ 
gent, may, like the seed, have been 
used as a condiment, as mustard and 
cress is with us. The nature of the 
plant, however, is to become arbo¬ 
reous ; and thus it will form a large 
shrub, or a tree, twenty-five feet high, 
under which a horseman may stand, 
where the soil and climate are favour¬ 
able. It produces numerous branches 
and leaves, among which birds may 
and do take shelter as well as build 
their nests. It has a name in Syria 
which may be considered as traditional 
from the earliest times, of which the 
Greek is a correct translation. Its 
seeds have the pungent taste, and are 
used for the same purposes as mustard. 
And in a country where trees are not 

e e 2 


The Birds. 


420 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


The Fish¬ 
eries. 


The 

Disco urses. 


the great fisheries, which once made the fame of Gen- 
nesareth, the two or three solitary fishermen casting their 
nets into the lake from its rocky banks, without recalling 
the image which here alone, in Inland Palestine, could have 
had a meaning ; of the net which was “ cast into the sea 
and gathered of every kind,” 1 from all the various tribes 
which still people those lonely waters. 

Of the rest of the parables I do not profess to speak. 
Some need no local illustration. Of others I have been 
unwilling to state anything beyond what fell within my 
own knowledge, or has been expressly recorded by trust¬ 
worthy observers. 

III. From the nature of the case, the Discourses of Christ 
are less directly connected with the scenes where they 
were delivered than the Parables. In the latter, outward 
imagery was expressly required ; in the former, it could 
only be incidental. Yet though for the most part the 
discourses will be understood wholly without regard to 
local allusions, it is always possible (it is in some cases 
probable), that they may be discerned. The intimate con¬ 
nection of the conversation at Jacob's Well with the neigh¬ 
bouring objects has been already noticed. 2 The natural 
growth of the discourse on the Bread of Life 3 from the 
multiplied bread in the Desert, is too obvious to need any 
explanation. The loud cry in the court of the Temple, on 
the last great day of the Feast of Tabernacles, 4 must refer 
to the spring in the heart of the Temple rock, from which 
flows the living water into the two pools of Siloam, 
whence on that day the water was brought to the Temple 
service. The declaration, “ I am the light of the world," 5 
has, with great probability, been referred to the lighting 
up the colossal candlestick in the same festival; the more 
remarkable in the profound darkness which then, as now, 


plentiful, i.e., the shores of the Lake of 
Tiberias, this tree is said to abound; 
i.e., in the very locality where the 
parable was spoken. If we consider, 
moreover,” he adds, “ the wide distribu¬ 
tion of this plant from Damascus to 
Cape Comorin, and from the Persian 
Gulf to Senegambia, we shall find that it 
is well suited to illustrate the typical 


comparison of the doctrine of the Gos¬ 
pel, which, though at first gaining only 
a few adherents, would, in the end, 
spread far and wide.” ( lb. 137.) 

1 Matth. xiii. 47.—See Chapter X. 

2 See Chapter V. 

3 John vi. 32, ff. 

4 John vii. 37. See Chapter III. 

6 John viii. 12. 


THE GOSPEL HISTORY AND TEACHING. 4&1 

reigned through the night of an Oriental town. The whited 
sepulchres, beautiful without, but within full of dead men’s 
bones, 1 are often supposed to be illustrated by the white¬ 
washed domes, which in Egypt and Syria always mark the 
tombs of Mussulman saints. But these are all modern, 
and there can be little doubt that the real explanation 
must be sought in the ornaments, and possibly the paint¬ 
ings, now disappeared, of the vast array of sepulchres 
with which the hills and valleys about Jerusalem are 
perforated, and some of which, if the discourse was spoken 
in the Temple, may have been visible at the moment in the 
Valley of the Kedron. 

These are perhaps all the allusions that can be traced 
in the special scenes of the lesser discourses. But we 
naturally ask whether, in the greatest of all, the Sermon ^ he 
on the Mount, any such can be discovered, spoken as it Mount, 
was, if not on the very mountain now pointed out in the 
plain of Hattin, yet certainly on one of the heights of the 
western shore of the lake, and, therefore, commanding a 
view, in its essential features common to all of them, 
and well known to us now. 2 It must be granted (per¬ 
haps we ought rather to say thankfully acknowledged), 
that there are very few passages in that discourse which 
are illustrated, still fewer which are explained, by a sight 
of the localities. These few, though often noticed, must 
be here briefly collected. 

1. One of the most striking objects in the prospect from The City 
any of these hills, especially from the traditional Mount on a HllL 
of the Beatitudes, is the city of Safed, placed high on 
a bold spur of the Galilean Anti-Lebanon. Dr. Robinson 
has done much to prove that Safed itself is a city of 
modern date. But, if any city or fortress existed on that 
site at the time of the Christian era, it is difficult to doubt 
the allusion to it, in “the city ‘lying’ on the mountain top.” 3 
The only other that could be embraced within the view 
of the speaker would be the village and fortress of Tabor, 
which would be distinctly visible from the Mount of the 
Beatitudes, though not from the hills on the lake-side. 

3 tt6\is i-rravco upovs Kti/ievrj. —Mattli. 
y. 14. 


1 Matth. xxiii. 27. 

2 See Chapter X. 


422 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


The Birds 
and the 
Flowers. 


The 

Torrent. 


Either or both of these would suggest the illustration, 
which would be more striking from the fact, that this 
situation of cities on the tops of hills is as rare in Galilee 
as it is common in Judaea. 

2. The most remarkable appeal to nature, which occurs 
in the whole of the New Testament, is found in this dis¬ 
course,—“ Behold the fowls of the air,” and “ Consider 
the lilies of the field.” 1 The flocks of birds in the neigh¬ 
bourhood of Gennesareth have been already observed. 
Their number, their beauty, their contrast with the busy 
stir of sowing and reaping, and putting into barns, visible 
in the plain below, (whether of Hattin or Gennesareth,) 2 
must all be taken into account. What the especial flower 
may be, which is here indicated by the word 3 which we 
translate “lily,” it is impossible precisely to determine. 
The only “ lilies ” which I saw in Palestine in the months 
of March and April were large yellow water-lilies, in the 
clear spring of 'Ain-Mellaheh, near the Lake of Merom. 
But if, as is probable, the name may include the numerous 
flowers of the tulip or amaryllis kind, which appear in the 
early summer, or the autumn of Palestine, the expression 
becomes more natural,—the red and golden hue more 
fitly suggesting the comparison with the proverbial 
gorgeousness of the robes of Solomon. And, though there 
may not be any special appropriateness to Galilee, the 
brilliant flowers of Palestine are one of the most attractive 
features of its scenery, the more so from the want of 
colour or form in the general landscape. 4 

3. The image with which, both in St. Matthew and St. 
Luke, the discourse concludes, is one familiar to all eastern 
and southern climates,—a torrent, suddenly formed by the 
mountain rains, and sweeping away all before it in its 
descent through what a few minutes before had been a 
dry channel. 5 Yet it may be observed that it is an image 
far more natural in Galilee than in Judaea; whether we 
take the perennial streams which run through the Plain of 

1 Matth.vi. 26, 28. 3 Kplvov. 

2 The Wady Hymam—the valley of 4 See Chapter I. ; Part II. Chapter II. 
Pigeons —leads straight from the plain 5 Matth. vii. 24 — 27; Luke vi. 
of Hattin to that of Gennesareth, with 48. 

the mountain visible at the end. 






THE GOSPEL HISTORY AND TEACHING. 


4 23 


Gennesareth, or the torrent-streams 1 of the Kishon and the 
Belus, which on the west run through the Plain of Esdraelon 
to the Mediterranean. There is more aptitude in this like¬ 
ness, as applied to them, than if applied to the scanty and 
rare flooding of the Kedron and the corresponding wadys 
of the south. The sudden inundation of the Kishon is a 
phenomenon already historical from the Old Testament; 
and, if we are to press the allusion to the “ sand” on which 
was built “ the house that fell," then there is no other 
locality in Palestine to which we can look, except the long 
sandy strip of land which bounds the eastern plain of 
Acre, and through which the Kishon flows into the sea. 

IV. Two or three obvious conclusions are forced upon 
us by this general view of the Parables and Discourses. 

First, if it is clear that the form of the teaching was 
suggested by the objects immediately present,—if the 
character of the Parables thus coincides with the notices 
of the localities where they occur,—it is a proof, incon¬ 
testable, and within small compass, that even that revela¬ 
tion, which was most unlike all others in its freedom 
from outward circumstance, was yet circumscribed, or (if 
we prefer so to state it) assisted by the objects within the 
actual range of the speaker’s vision. It is an argument, 
such as in the days of subtle theological speculation might 
have been justly and forcibly used for what is termed the 
Perfect Humanity of Christ. It is an argument which, in 
our own time, may be more practically used to show the 
simplicity and reality of a teaching which took its stand 
on the ordinary sights and sounds, still seen and heard in 
the same land where that teaching was delivered. And, 
if it was thus suggested by outward existing images, 
it must also, by those images, be judged and explained. 
We are apt sometimes to carry out into an infinite series 


1 Schwarze (p. 73) speaks of a prayer 
offered up by the High Priest on the 
day of Atonement for the inhabitants 
“ of the valley of Sharon,” that their 
houses might not become their graves, 
—in allusion to the danger to which 
they were exposed from mountain 
torrents. (Jerusalem Talmud, Joma, 
c. v.) He supposes that this valley is 


the part of the Plain of Esdraelon 
enclosed between Little Hermon and 
Gilboa. The grounds for this supposi¬ 
tion, which chiefly rests on the modern 
name of the village of Shvrinm the valley 
of Jezreel, are hardly sufficient. But, if 
correct, it exactly suits the Galilean 
origin of this parable. 


Conclusions. 


Reality of 
the 

Teaching. 




424 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


Homeliness 
and Uni¬ 
versality. 


of moral and theological conclusions the truths which are 
stated under these material forms. It might, perhaps, 
serve both to restrain us from precipitate inferences, and 
also to relieve us from some difficulties, if we bore in mind 
that the distinctness which necessarily belongs to physical 
objects cannot be transferred bodily to the moral world. 1 
When, for example, we look on the track of the road, 
on the protruding rocks, on the thorny thickets, on the 
deep mould of the corn-fields of Gennesareth,—or, again, 
on the white sheep and the black goats of the flocks in 
Judea,—we ought to feel that the division of mankind into 
various classes, when represented under those figures, 
necessarily assumes a definiteness of separation, which 
cannot be applied without modification to the complexities 
of the actual world. 

2. Again, the mere fact, that our Lord’s teaching was 
suggested by familiar and passing objects, is not without 
interest and instruction. It shows that He was affected 
by the outward impressions of the moment, not only in 
the graver events of His life, as when the sudden view of 
Jerusalem filled His eyes with tears, or the sight of 
sufferers drew forth the heaving sigh and the bitter groan, 
but habitually, and in His daily intercourse. Even if we 
knew no more than this general fact, it would be to us a 
touching proof that He was of “ the same flesh and blood,” 
“ tried ” in all points, “ like as we are.” But another and a 
higher thought strikes us when we consider what were the 
especial objects which thus, if one may so say, gave a 
colour to the thoughts and expressions of Him who spake 
as never man spake. Though characteristic not only 
of the country, but of the particular spots of country, 
where the parables and discourses were uttered, they are 
yet so common and obvious that, but for these sacred 
allusions, one would pass them by without notice. The 
grander features of the scenery, the mountains, the forests, 
the striking points of Oriental vegetation, palm and cedar 
and terebinth, the images, in short, which fill the pages of 
the Psalmists and Prophets of the Older Dispensation have 

1 I owe this remark to a friend to whom it was suggested by the above 
descriptions. 



THE GOSPEL HISTORY AND TEACHING. 


425 


no place in the Gospel Discourses. He must have been 
familiar with the magnificent prospect from the heights 
above Nazareth. Hermon and Tabor must have been 
constantly before Him in His later wanderings. The 
Pisgah-view must have been His from the Peraean hills. 
Yet none of these came within the circle of His teaching. 
Perhaps the only exception, and that a doubtful one, is the 
allusion in the Sermon on the Mount to the city set on a 
“ mountain/' But this is a mere passing glance at a single 
point in the landscape. As a general rule, every image, 
every emotion is drawn from the humbler and plainer 
figures of every-day life and observation,—vineyards and 
corn-fields, shepherds and ploughmen, travellers and fisher¬ 
men. And if the beauty of nature attract His notice, it 
is still of the same simple and general kind,—the burst of 
the radiance of an eastern sun,—the lively instincts and 
movements of the careless birds over His head,—the gay 
colours of the carpet of flowers under His feet. If there 
be any one passage of the older Scriptures which specially 
represents the natural storehouse of the Parables of the 
Gospel, it is the gentle and touching burst of the imagery 
of spring in the Song of Songs : “ The winter is past, the 
rain is over and gone ; the flowers appear on the earth ; 
the time of the singing of birds is come, and the voice of 
the turtle is heard in our land ; the fig-tree putteth forth 
her green figs, and the vines with the tender grape give a 
good smell." 1 It were vain to ask the precise cause of 
these omissions and selections. Perhaps there may be 
found some answer in the analogies, partial as they are, 
of the absorption of the greatest of ancient philosophers, 
of the noblest of mediaeval saints : which made Socrates 
delight in the city rather than in the country; which 
made St. Bernard on the shores of Geneva unconscious of 
the magnificence of the lake and mountains round him. 
But rather, perhaps, we may say that it was the same 
humble and matter-of-fact, yet at the same time universal 
spirit, which characterised the whole course of His life 
on earth, and has formed the main outlines of His religion 


1 Song of Solomon ii. 11—13. 




426 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


Union of 
Human 
and Divine. 




since. The homeliness of the illustrations, whilst it links 
the teaching with the daily life of His time, yet sufficiently 
frees them from local peculiarity to render them of uni¬ 
versal application. They gain more force and vividness 
by being still seen on the spot, but they need little or 
no explanation beyond what they themselves convey. 
What has often been said of the two Sacraments is, in 
fact, but one instance of what applies to His whole ministry. 
Taken from the common usages of Eastern life, ablution and 
the social meal, from the common elements of nature, water, 
bread, and the fruit of the vine, there is hardly a country 
where they are not easily accessible and intelligible. 
A groundwork of historical and geographical fact, with 
a wide applicability extending beyond the limits of any 
age or country ; a religion rising in the East, yet finding 
its highest development and fulfilment in the West: a 
character and teaching human, Hebrew, Syrian, in its 
outward form and colour, but in its inward spirit and 
characteristics universal and divine—such are the general 
conclusions, discernible, doubtless, from any careful study 
of the Gospels, but impressed with peculiar force on the 
observant traveller by the sight of the Holy Land. 

3. Lastly, the whole effect of these points of homely 
contact between the life of Christ and the earthly scenes 
of His ministrations, leaves two thoughts not to be set 
aside. On the one hand, it is useless to deny that there 
is a shock to the religious sentiment in finding ourselves 
on the actual ground of events which we have been 
accustomed to regard as transacted in heaven, rather 
than on earth,—which we have been led by pictures 
and preaching and poetry to invest with an atmosphere 
too ideal to be brought into contact with anything so 
prosaic as the actual stocks and stones of Syria. “Is 
not this the son of the carpenter f Is not his mother 
called Mary f And his brethren James , and John , and 
Simon , and Judas f A nd his sisters , are they not all with 
us f A Prophet has no honour in his own country But, 
on the other hand, this very feeling gives us a sense of 
solidity and substance in the character thus presented to 
us, which it is our own fault if we do not turn to account. 



THE GOSPEL HISTORY AND TEACHING. 


427 


So completely one of tlie sons of men, a career so cir¬ 
cumscribed by the roads, and valleys, and hills of an ordi¬ 
nary home and country; and yet (to go no higher than 
the mere outward contemplation of the history takes us), 
so universal in the fame, the effects, the spirit of His 
teaching and life.—“ From whence hath this man these 
things f and what wisdom is this which is given unto him 
that even such mighty works are wrought by his hands f ” 1 

1 Matt. xiii. 54; Mark, vi. 3. 













































CHAPTER XIV, 


THE HOLY PLACES. 

Psalm cii. 14.—Thy servants take pleasure in her stones, and favour 
the dust thereof. 


Catalogue of the Holy Places :—I. Bethlehem. 1. Church of Helena. 
2. Grotto of the Nativity. 3. Cell of Jerome. II. Nazareth. 1. Spring 
of the Greek Church. 2. Grotto of the Latin Church. 3. House of 
Loretio. III. Jerusalem. 1. Mosque of the Ascension. 2. Tomb 
of the Virgin. 3. Garden of Gethsemane. 4. Ccenaculum. 5. The 
Holy Sepulchre—The Church—Greek Easter—Holy Fire—Conclusion. 




HOUSE AT LORETTO. 



1. Chimney. J 1. 

2. Door. ] 2. 

3. Altar. j 3. 

4. Window. j 4. 


Alleged site of the House. 
Pillar of the Angel. 

Grotto of the Annunciation, 
Grotto of the Neighbours. 


See 


page 439. 







THE HOLY PLACES. 


It has been the object of the foregoing Chapters to 
represent the connection between the topography of 
Palestine and the historical events of the Old and New 
Testament. There remains another interest—in every 
way inferior, but still living and powerful—that which 
attaches to what are technically called “ the Holy Places.” 
By this term are meant not the scenes of sacred events, 
taken generally, but such special localities as the Greek 
or Latin Church, or both conjointly, have selected as 
objects of pilgrimage. Of course, the historical scenes and 
the sanctuaries will sometimes coincide. But this is by no 
means universal. Some scenes which the whole Christian 
world would naturally regard as most sacred, are almost 
wholly neglected by the mass of pilgrims properly so called. 
Others, which rank high in the estimation of local and 
ecclesiastical tradition, are probably unknown beyond the 
immediate sphere of those who worship in them. And 
the most important are so slightly connected with the 
actual thread of the Sacred History, and, if ever so genuine, 
would throw so little light upon it, that the whole subject 
is best reserved for a consideration distinct from that 
which has been bestowed on the general geography of 
the Holy Land. But they have an interest of their own ; 
they have been for ages objects of a reverence which still 
diverts some and alienates others from the greater 
centres of local instruction which the Holy Land contains. 
They caused the greatest event of the middle ages— 
the Crusades; and, indirectly, invited Columbus to the 


The Holy 
Places. 




SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


432 


discovery of the New World. They exhibit within a 
narrow compass, the feuds between the Greek and Latin 
Churches, which have rent Christendom asunder, which 
overthrew the Byzantine Empire, and which now after 
a lapse of many centuries have once more, in direct con¬ 
nection with these very sanctuaries, involved the world in 
a terrible war. 

Of these places there are twelve preeminent above 
the rest: — 1. Church of the Nativity at Bethlehem 
(common). 2. Church of the Annunciation at Nazareth 
(Latin). 3. Church of Jacob’s Well at Nablous (destroyed). 
4. Church at Cana (Greek). 5. Church of St. Peter at 
Tiberias (Latin). 6. Church of the Presentation at Jeru¬ 
salem (Mussulman). 7. Church of the Flagellation (Latin). 
8. Grotto of Gethsemane (Latin). 9. Tomb of the Virgin 
(common). 10. Church of the Ascension (Mussulman). 
11. Church of the Apostles or ‘of the Last Supper’ 
(Mussulman). 12. Church of the Holy Sepulchre 
(common) 1 . But, as some of those have been long 
deserted, and others depend for their support entirely on 
the greater sanctuaries in their neighbourhood, I shall 
confine myself to those which exist in Bethlehem, 
Nazareth, and Jerusalem. 2 

I. Whether from its being usually the first seen by 
travellers, or from its own intrinsic solemnity, there is 
probably none which produces so great an impression at 
first sight as the Convent of the Nativity at Bethlehem. 
It is an enormous pile of buildings, extending along the 
ridge of the hill from west to east, and consisting of the 
Church of the Nativity, with the three convents, Latin, 
Greek, and Armenian, abutting respectively upon its 
north-eastern, south-eastern, and south-western extre¬ 
mities. Externally there is nothing to command attention 

1 I have given these spots as they locality. The other upper localities 
are mentioned in the slight but candid shall be noticed in passing, 
and perspicuous treatise of the Abb£ 3 Tobler has shown that a great part 
Michon, Solution Nouvelle de la Question of the Church of Helena has been 
des Lieux Saintes. 1853. Of these the superseded by the successive edifices 
third has been long since abandoned as of Justinian and Emanuel Comnenus 
a resort of pilgrims, and its site (see (Bethlehem, p. 104, 105). But there 
Chapter V.) depends not on any seems no sufficient reason to dispute the 
ecclesiastical tradition, but on the antiquity of the nave, 
unchanging features of the whole of the 


THE HOLY PLAjCES. 


433 


beyond its size—the more imposing from the meanness 
and smallness of the village, which hangs as it were on 
its western skirts. In the Church itself the only portion 
of peculiar interest is the nave—common to all the sects, 
and for that very reason deserted, bare, discrowned, 
but in all probability the most ancient monument of 
Christian architecture in the world. It is all that now 
remains of the Basilica, built by Helena herself, the 
prototype of those built by her Imperial son at Jeru¬ 
salem, beside the Holy Sepulchre and at Rome, over 
the graves of St. Paul and of St. Peter. The long 
double lines of Corinthian pillars, the faded mosaics, 
dimly visible on the walls above, as in the two Churches 
of St. Apollinaris at Ravenna, the rough ceiling of beams 
of cedar from Lebanon, still preserve the outlines of the 
Church, once 1 blazing with gold and marble—in which 
Baldwin was crowned, and which received its latest repairs 
from our own Edward IV. 2 

2. From this, the only interesting portion of the upper 
church, we descend to that subterranean vault, over which, 
and for which, the whole structure was erected. There, 
at the entrance of a long winding passage, excavated out 
of the limestone rock, of which the hill of Bethlehem is 
composed, the pilgrim finds himself in an irregular chapel, 
dimly lighted with silver lamps, and containing two small 
recesses, nearly opposite each other. In the northern¬ 
most of these is a marble slab, which marks the supposed 
spot of the Nativity, with the rays of the silver star, sent 
from Vienna in 1852, to supply the place of that which 
the Greeks—truly or falsely—were charged with having 
stolen. In the southern recess, three steps deeper in the 
chapel, is the alleged stall, in which, according to the Latin 
tradition, was discovered the wooden manger or “prsesepe,” 
now deposited in the magnificent Basilica of S. Maria 
Maggiore at Rome, and there displayed under the auspices 
of the Pope, every Christmas-day. 

Let us pause for a moment in the dim vault, between 
those two recesses ; let us dismiss the consideration of 


The Church 
of Helena. 


The Grotto 
of the Na¬ 
tivity. 


1 Tobler, ibid. p. 110. 


2 Ibid. p. 112. See Chap. II. p. 140. 


434 


SINM AND PALESTINE. 


the lesser memorials which surround us on all sides—the 
altar of the Magi—of the Shepherds—of Joseph—of the 
Innocents—to which, probably, no one would now attach 
any other than an imaginative importance, and ask 
what ground there is for believing or disbelieving the 
tradition which invites us to confine the awful asso¬ 
ciations of the village of Bethlehem within these rocky 
walls. Alone, of all the existing local traditions of Pales¬ 
tine, this one indisputably reaches beyond the time of 
Constantine. Already in the second century, “a cave 
near Bethlehem” was fixed upon as the place where, 
“there being no place in the village, where he could 
lodge, 1 Joseph abode, and where accordingly Christ was 
born and laid in a manger.” And this seems to have 
been the constant tradition of the place, even amongst 
those who were not Christians, in the next generation, 2 
and to have been uniformly maintained in the Apocryphal 
Gospels, which have always exercised so powerful an influ¬ 
ence over the popular belief of the humbler classes of the 
Christian world, both in the East and the West. It is perhaps 
invidious to remark on the deviations from the Gospel 
narrative, which tells us that the want of room was not 
in the village, but in the inn ; and that the hardship was 
not that they were driven from the village to the inn, but 
from the inn to the manger. 3 Such a deviation implies, 
perhaps, an independent origin of the local tradition, but 
not necessarily its falsehood. And if at Bethlehem the 
caves in the limestone rock, on which the village stands, 
were commonly used as elsewhere in Palestine for horses 
and cattle, the omission of all allusion to the cave in 
St. Luke’s narrative would be, to a certain extent, ex¬ 
plained. On the other hand, the general impression of 
the account in Justin is certainly different from that 
of St. Luke ; and if (with the tradition which Justin 

1 Justin. Dial, cum Tryph. 78. side the town. In the Gospel of the 

2 Origen, c. Cels. i. 51. Nativity of Mary, c. iv., the birth is 

3 The Apocryphal Gospel of St. described as taking place in the cave, 
James, c. xviii. xix., and the Gospel of and the manger as being outside the 
the Infancy, c. ii., iii., iv., represent cave. The quotations and arguments 
Joseph as going at once to the cave are well summed up in Thilo’s Codex 
and confine all the subsequent events Apocryphus, p. 382, 383. 

to the cave, which is described as out- 



THE HOLY PLACES. 


435 


seems to have followed, and which has unquestionably 
prevailed since the time of Jerome) we lay the scene 
of the Adoration of the Magi on the same spot, it is 
positively irreconcilable with the words of St. Matthew, 
that they came into the “ house where the young child 
was.” We must add to this the often-repeated sus¬ 
picion which Maundrell was the first to express, which 
attaches to the constant connection of the several localities 
of Palestine with grottoes and caves. However much it 
may be urged that, in a country like Palestine, natural 
excavations are unavoidably employed for purposes of 
dwelling, of sepulture, of rest, for which in Europe they 
never would be used, yet for this very reason there 
would be a disposition to attach events to them, if the 
real locality had been forgotten. If, for example, in 
the case now in question, the caravanserai or khan had 
been swept away in the convulsions of the Jewish war, 
and the inhabitants of Bethlehem had any wish to give a 
local habitation to the event which made their village 
illustrious, they would almost inevitably fix on a strongly- 
marked natural feature, such as the cave of the convent 
must, in its original aspect, have been . 1 And another 
motive leading to the same result transpires through the 
same passage of Justin which first mentions the tradition, 
namely, the attempt to find a fulfilment of a fancied 
prediction of the Messiah’s birth in the LXX trans¬ 
lation of the words of Isaiah, “ He shall dwell on high ; 
his place of defence shall be in “ a lofty cave of the 
strong rock.” 2 

One further objection to the identity of the whole scene 
must be mentioned in conclusion. During the troubled 
period of the invasion of Ibrahim Pasha the Arab popula¬ 
tion of Bethlehem took possession of the convent, and 
dismantled the whole of the recess of that gilding and 

1 See Chap. II. p. 149. The universal ages. _ (Sanutus iii. c. 7.) But the early 
employment of caves for the scenes of mention of the actual caves in the most 
sacred events excited surprise as early celebrated instances shows that this is 
as the thirteenth century, and was then inadequate. 

accounted for by the not unnatural hy- 2 h <rm\ka\y ’urxvpas rrcrpas 

potbesis that the places so shown were (Isa. xxxi. 16). The English version 
the remains of buildings built under translates it “ the munitions of rocks.” 
the accumulated ruins of subsequent 

f f 2 







436 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


marble which is the bane of so many sanctuaries, European 
and Asiatic. The native rock of the cave was disclosed ; 
but also, it is said, an ancient sepulchre hewn in that very 
spot. It is possible, but hardly possible, that a rock 
devoted to sepulchral purposes would have been employed 
by Jews, whose scruples on this subject are too well 
known to need comment, either as an inn or a stable. 

Still there remains the remarkable fact that the spot 
was reverenced by Christians as the birth-place of Christ 
two centuries before the conversion of the Empire,— 
before that burst of local religion which is commonly 
ascribed to the visit of Helena. And out of these earliest 
and most sacred of its recollections has grown a sub¬ 
ordinate train of associations, which has at least the 
advantage of being unquestionably grounded on fact. If 
the traveller follows the windings of that long subter¬ 
ranean gallery, he will find himself at its close in a rough 
chamber hewn out of the rock; here sufficiently clear to 
need no proof or vindication. In this cell, in all probabi¬ 
lity, lived and died the most illustrious of all the pilgrims 
attracted to the Cave of Bethlehem—the only one of the 
many hermits and monks from the time of Constantine 
to the present day sheltered within its rocky sides, whose 
name has travelled beyond the limits of the Holy Land. 
Here, for more than thirty years, beside what he believed 
to be literally the cradle of the Christian faith, Jerome 
fasted, prayed, dreamed, and studied—here he gathered 
round him his devoted followers in the small communities 
which formed the beginnings of conventual life in Pales¬ 
tine—here, the fiery spirit which he had brought with 
him from his Dalmatian birthplace, and which had been 
first roused to religious fervour on the banks of the 
Moselle, vented itself in the flood of treatises, letters, com¬ 
mentaries, which he poured forth from his retirement, to 
terrify, exasperate, and enlighten the Western world— 
here also was composed the famous translation of the 
Scriptures which is still the “Biblia Vulgata” of the Latin 
Church; and here took place that pathetic scene, his last 
communion and death—at which all the world has been 
permitted to be present in the wonderful picture of 







THE HOLY PLACES. 


437 


Domenichino, which has represented, in colours never to be 
surpassed, the attenuated frame of the weak and sinking 
flesh—the resignation and devotion of the spirit ready for 
its immediate departure. 

II. The interest of the “Holy Place” of Nazareth is of Nazareth. 
a kind different from that of Bethlehem. 1 At the south¬ 
eastern extremity of the village stands the massive con¬ 
vent, so well known from the hospitable reception it 
affords to travellers caught in the storms of the hills of 
Gilboa, or attacked by the Bedouins of the plain of 
Esdraelon; so well known also for the impressiveness of 
its religious services, where wild figures in the rough 
drapery and the rude rope-fillet and kefyeh of the Bedouin 
dress, join in the responses of Christian worship, and the 
chants of the Latin Church are’ succeeded by a sermon 
addressed to these strange converts in their own native 
Arabic with all the earnestness and solemnity of the 
preachers of Italy. There is no church in Palestine 
where the religious services seem so worthy of the 
sacredness of the place. 

But neither is there any place where traditional and 
local sanctities undergo so severe a shock. 2 Elsewhere, 
however discreditable the conflicts of the various sects, 
they have yet for the most part agreed (and indeed this 
very agreement is the occasion of their conflicts) on the 
spots which they wish to venerate. But at Nazareth there 
are three counter-theories—each irreconcileable with the 
other—in relation to the special scene, which has been 
selected for peculiar reverence. 

1. From the entrance of the Franciscan church a flight of Grotto in 
steps descends to an altar, which stands within a recess, consent! 1 
partly cased in marble, but partly showing the natural 
rock out of which it is formed. On a marble slab in front 


1 The two lesser sanctuaries visited 
by pilgrims from Nazareth, are the 
Greek church of Cana, as the scene of 
the marriage supper, and the Latin 
Church of Tibei’ias, as the scene of the 
house of St. Peter. The former has 
been thrown into the shade of un¬ 
certainty, since Dr. Robinson (B. R. II. 
204—208), pointed out its more ancient 


rival at Kana-el-Jelil,now long deserted. 
The latter has been already noticed at 
the end of Chapter X. 

2 Besides the difficulties which we 
are about to notice, there is the clumsy 
legend of the “ Mountain of Precipita¬ 
tion,” too well known to need further 
comment or refutation. (See Robin¬ 
son, iii. p. 187.) See Chapter X. 




438 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


Spring at 
or near 
the Greek 
Church. 


of this altar, worn with the kisses of many pilgrims, are 
the words “ Verbum caro hie factum est,” and intended to 
mark the spot on which the Virgin stood when she re¬ 
ceived the angelic visitation. Close by is a broken pillar, 1 
which in like manner is pointed out as indicating the space 
occupied by the celestial visitant, who is supposed to have 
entered through a hole in the rocky wall forming the 
western front of the cave, close by the opening which now 
unites it with the church. The back, or eastern side of the 
grotto behind the altar opens by a narrow passage into a 
further cave, left much more nearly in its natural state, 
and said by an innocent tradition, which no one would 
care either to assert or to refute, to have been the residence 
of a friendly neighbour who looked after the adjacent 
house when Mary departed on her journey to see Elizabeth 
in Judaea. 

2. To any one who knows the rivalry which prevails in 
the East between the Greeks and Latins on the subject of 
the Holy Places, it will not be surprising that the Greeks 
excluded from this convent, have their own “ Church of 
the Annunciation ” at the opposite end of the town. But 
it would be an injustice to them to suppose that this con¬ 
tradiction was merely the result of jealousy. In the 
abstinence of the Scriptural narrative from any attempt to 
localise the scene—from any indication whether it took 
place by day or night, in house or field—the Greeks may 
at least be pardoned for having clung to the faint 
shadow of tradition which lingers in the Apocryphal 
Gospels. In that which bears the name of St. James we 
are told that the first salutation of the Angel came to 
Mary 2 as she was drawing water from the spring in the 
neighbourhood of the town. That spring ? still remains, 
and bears her name, and in the open meadow by its side 
stands the Greek Church of the Annunciation, a dull and 

1 This pillar is one of the many in- probably in one of the many assaults 
stances we meet of what may be called which the convent has suffered, 
the extinction of a traditional miracle, 2 Protev. Jacobi, c. xi. — Epitaph. 
in deference to the spirit of the time. Paul. 

To all the early travellers it was shown 3 The spring, however, is also shown 

as a supernatural suspension of a stone. to travellers under the altar of the 
To all later travellers it is exhibited Greek church, 
merely as what it is, a column, broken 


THE HOLY PLACES. 


439 


mournful contrast in its closed doors and barbarous archi¬ 
tecture to the solemn yet animated worship of the Fran¬ 
ciscan convent—but undoubtedly with a better claim to 
be an authentic memorial of the event which they both 
claim as their own. 

3. But the tradition of the Latin Church has to undergo 
a yet ruder trial. There is another scene of the Annun¬ 
ciation, not at the other extremity of the little town of 
Nazareth, but in another continent—not maintained by a 
rival and hostile sect, but fostered by the Supreme Head 
itself of the Roman Church. On the slope of the eastern 
Apennines, overlooking the Adriatic Gulf, stands what 
may be called (according to the belief of the Roman 
Catholic Church) the European Nazareth. Fortified 
as if by the bastions of a huge castle, against the 
approach of Saracenic pirates, a vast church, even 
now gorgeous with the offerings of the faithful, con¬ 
tains the “ Santa Casa,” the “ Holy House,” in which the 
Virgin lived, and (as is attested by the same inscription 
as that at Nazareth) received the Angel Gabriel. Every 
one knows the story of the House of Loretto. The devo¬ 
tion of one-half the world, and the ridicule of the other 
half, has made us all acquainted with the strange story, 
written in all the languages 1 of Europe round the walls 
of that remarkable sanctuary : how the house of Nazareth 
was, in the close of the thirteenth century, conveyed by 
angels, first to the heights above Fiume, at the head of 
the Adriatic Gulf, then to the plain, and lastly to the hill, 
of Loretto. But this “ wondrous flitting ” of the Holy 
House is not the feature in its history which is most pre¬ 
sent to the pilgrims who frequent it. It is regarded by 
them simply as an actual fragment of the Holy Land, 
sacred as the very spot on which the mystery of the In¬ 
carnation was announced and begun. In proportion to 
the sincerity and extent of this belief is the veneration 


1 Of these numerous versions of the 
story, made in 1635, one is in English, 
one in Lowland Scotch, containing all 
the peculiarities of diction with which 
every one is so familiar from the 
nearly contemporary conversations of 


King James I. in “The Fortunes of 
Nigel;” showing clearly that at that 
time these two dialects of English 
were regarded as two distinct lan¬ 
guages, each unintelligible to the 
speaker of the other. 


House at 
Loretto. 





440 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


which attaches to what is undoubtedly the most fre¬ 
quented sanctuary of Christendom. The devotion of 
pilgrims even on week-days exceeds anything that is seen 
at any of the holy places in Palestine, if we except the 
Church of the Holy Sepulchre at Easter. 

Before the dawn of day the worship begins. Whilst it 
is yet dark, the doors are opened—a few lights round the 
sacred spot break the gloom, and disclose the kneeling 
Capuchins, who have been here throughout the night. 
Two soldiers, sword in hand, take their place by the 
entrance of the “ House,” to guard it against all injury. 
One of the hundred priests who are in daily attendance 
immediately begins mass at the high altar of the church, 
the first of a hundred and twenty that are repeated daily 
within its precincts. The “ Santa Casa ” itself is then 
opened and lighted, the pilgrims flock in ; and, from that 
hour till sunset, come and go in a perpetual stream. 
The “ House ” is thronged with kneeling or prostrate 
figures, the pavement round it is deeply worn with the 
passage of pilgrims, who, from the humblest peasant of 
the Abruzzi up to the King of Naples, crawl round it on 
their knees; the nave is filled with the bands of wor¬ 
shippers who, having visited the sacred spot, are retiring 
backwards from it, as from some royal presence. 

On the Santa Casa alone depends the sacredness of the 
whole locality in which it stands. Loretto—whether the 
name is derived from the sacred grove (Lauretum) or the 
lady (Loreta) under whose shelter the house is believed 
to have descended—had no existence before the rise of 
this extraordinary sanctuary. The long street with its 
venders of rosaries, the palace of the governor, the strong- 
walls built by Pope Sixtus IV., are all mere appendages 
to the humble edifice which stands within the Church. 
The “ Santa Casa ” is spoken of by them as a living 
person, a corporation sole on which the whole city 
depends, to which the whole property far and near over 
the rich plain which lies spread beneath it belongs 
for ever. 

No one who has ever witnessed the devotion of the 
Italian people on this singular spot, can wish to speak 


THE HOLY PLACES. 


441 


lightly of the feelings which it inspires. But a dispas¬ 
sionate statement of the real facts of the case may not be 
without use. Into the general question of the story we 
need not enter here. It has been ably proved elsewhere, 1 
first, that of all the pilgrims who record their visit to 
Nazareth from the fourth to the sixteenth century, not 
one alludes to any house of Joseph as standing there, 
or as having stood there, within human memory or record ; 
secondly, that the records of Italy contain no mention of 
the House till the fifteenth century ; thirdly, that the 
representation of the story as it now stands, with the 
double or triple transplantation of the sanctuary, occurs 
first in a bull of Leo X. in the year 1518. But it is the 
object of these remarks simply to confront the House 
as it stands at Loretto with the House as it appears 
at Nazareth. It has been already said that each pro¬ 
fesses to contain the exact spot of the Angelic visitation, 
to be the scene of a single event which can only have 
happened in one ; each claims to be the very House of the 
Annunciation, and bases its claim to sanctity on that 
especial ground. But this is not all : even should either 
consent to surrender something of this peculiar sacredness, 
yet no one can visit both sanctuaries without perceiving 
that by no possibility can one be amalgamated with the 
other. The House at Loretto is an edifice of thirty-six 
feet by seventeen : its walls, though externally cased in 
marble, can be seen in their original state from the inside, 
and these appear to be of a dark red polished stone. The 
west wall has one square window, through which it is said 
the Angel flew ; the east wall contains a rude chimney, in 
front of which is a mass of cemented stone, said to be 
the altar on which St. Peter said mass, when the Apostles, 
after the Ascension, turned the house into a church. On 
the north side is (or rather was) a door, now walled up. 
The monks of Loretto and of Nazareth have but a dim 
knowledge of the sacred localities of each other. Still, 


1 See an elaborate and conclusive brancer,” April, 1855, shortly after the 
Essay on the origin of the story of substance of these remarks had been 
the “ Holy House of Loretto,” which published in the Quarterly Review, 
appeared in the “ Christian Remem- 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


the monks of Nazareth could not be altogether ignorant 
of the mighty sanctuary which, under the highest autho¬ 
rities of their Church, professes to have once rested on 
the ground they now occupy. They show, therefore, 
to any traveller who takes the pains to inquire, the space 
on which the Holy House stood before its flight. That 
space is a vestibule immediately in front of the sacred 
grotto ; and an attempt is made to unite the two loca¬ 
lities by supposing that there were openings from the 
house into the grotto. Without laying any stress on 
the obvious variation of measurements, the position 
of the grotto is, and must always have been, abso¬ 
lutely incompatible with any such adjacent building as 
that at Loretto. Whichever way the house is supposed 
to abut on the rock, it is obvious that such a house as 
has been described, would have closed up, with blank 
walls, the very passages by which alone the communica¬ 
tion could be effected. And it may be added, that 
although there is no traditional masonry of the Santa Casa 
left at Nazareth, there is the traditional masonry close by 
of the so-called workshop of Joseph of an entirely different 
character. Whilst the former is of a kind wdiolly unlike 
anything in Palestine, the latter is, as might be expected, 
of the natural gray limestone of the country, of which in 
all times, no doubt, the houses of Nazareth were built. 

It may have seemed superfluous labour to have 
attempted any detailed refutation of the most incredible 1 
of Ecclesiastical legends. But Loretto is so emphatically 
the “Holy Place ” of one large branch of Christendom— 
its claim has been so strongly maintained by French and 
Italian writers of our own times—and is moreover, so 

1 The story of the House of Loretto disappeared from Palestine in the first 
acquires a painful interest from its con- century, and lay concealed in some un- 
nection with the history of the unfor- known place till its arrival at Loretto 
tunate and gifted Leopardi, known to in 1291. This hypothesis of course is 
the English public chiefly through a intended to meet the difficulty arising 
striking account of his character and from the total absence of allusion to 
writings in the Quarterly Review (vol. any such house at Nazareth before that 
86, p. 334). His father—like himself, time. How far, we may fairly ask, 
an inhabitant of Recanati, the town are the guardians of Loretto answerable 
which claims the credit of having first for the alienation of their illustrious 
received the rumour of the arrival of neighbour from the faith of Chris- 
the Santa Casa in its neighbourhood— tianity ? 
wrote a book to prove that the House 






THE HOLY PLACES. 


443 


deeply connected with the alleged authority of the Papal 
See—that an interest attaches to it far beyond its intrinsic 
importance. No facts are insignificant which bring to an 
issue the general value of local religion—or the assumption 
of any particular Church to direct the conscience of the 
world—or the amount of liberty within such a Church 
left on questions which concern the faith and practice of 
thousands of its members. 

But the legend is also curious as an illustration of the 
history of “ Holy Places” generally. It is difficult to say 
how it originated—or what led to the special selection of the 
Adriatic Gulf as the scene of such a fable ; yet, generally 
speaking, the explanation is easy and instructive. Nazareth 
was taken by Sultan Khalil in 1291, when he stormed the 
last refuge of the Crusaders in the neighbouring city of 
Acre. From that time, not Nazareth only, but the whole 
of Palestine, was closed to the devotions of Europe. The 
Crusaders were expelled from Asia, and in Europe the 
spirit of the Crusades was extinct. But the natural 
longing to see the scenes of the events of the Sacred 
History—the superstitious craving to win for prayer the 
favour of consecrated localities—did not expire with the 
Crusades. Can we wonder that, under such circum¬ 
stances, there should have arisen the feeling, the desire, 
the belief, that if Mahomet could not go to the mountain, 
the mountain must come to Mahomet \ The House of 
Loretto is the petrifaction, so to speak, of the “ Last sigh 
of the Crusades suggested possibly by the Holy House 
of St. Francis at Assisi, then first acquiring its European 
celebrity. It is indeed not a matter of conjecture that in 
Italy—the country where the passionate temperament of 
the people would most need such stimulants—persons 
in this state of mind did actually endeavour, so far 
as circumstances permitted, to reproduce the scenes of 
Palestine within their own immediate neighbourhood. 
One such is the Campo Santo of Pisa—“ the Holy Field,” 
as this is “ the Holy House”—literally a cargo of sacred 
earth from the Valley of Hinnom, carried, as is well 
known, not on the wings of angels, but in the ships of 
the Pisan Crusaders. Another example is the remarkable 





444 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


Church of St. Stephen’s, at Bologna, within whose 
walls are crowded together various chapels and courts, 
representing not only, as in the actual Church of the 
Sepulchre, the several scenes of the Crucifixion, but the 
Trial and Passion also ; and which is entitled, in a long 
inscription affixed to its cloister, the “ Saiicta Sanctorum 
nay, literally “the Jerusalem ” of Italy. 1 A third still 
more curious instance may be seen at Varallo, in the 
kingdom of Piedmont. Bernardino Caimo, returning 
from a pilgrimage to Palestine at the close of the fifteenth 
century, resolved to select the spot in Lombardy most 
resembling the Holy Land, in order to give his country¬ 
men the advantage of praying at the Holy Place without 
undergoing the privations which he had suffered himself. 
Accordingly, in one of the beautiful valleys leading down 
from the roots of Monte Rosa, he chose (it must be con¬ 
fessed that the resemblance is of the slightest kind) three 
hills, which should represent respectively Tabor, Olivet, 
and Calvary; and two mountain-streams, wffiich should 
in like manner personate the Kedron and Jordan. Of 
these the central hill, Calvary, became the “ Holy Place” 
of Lombardy. It w r as frequented by S. Carlo Borromeo ; 
under his auspices the whole mountain was studded with 
chapels, in which the scenes of the Passion are represented 
in waxen figures of the size of life ; and the whole country 
round now sends its peasants by thousands as pilgrims to 
the sacred spot. We have only to suppose these feelings 
existing as they naturally would exist in a more fervid 
state two centuries earlier, when the loss of Palestine was 
more keenly felt—when the capture of Nazareth especially 
was fresh in every one’s mind—and we can easily imagine 
that the same tendency, which by deliberate purpose pro¬ 
duced a second Jerusalem at Bologna and a second 
Palestine at Varallo, would, on the secluded shores of the 
Adriatic, by some peasant’s dream, or the return of some 
Croatian chief from the last Crusade, or the story of some 
Eastern voyager landing on their coasts, produce a second 

1 This church was, at least in its cellent account of it in Professor 
foundation, considerably earlier than Willis’s Essay on the Architectural 
that of Loretto, having been first erected History of the Church of the Holy 
in the fifth century. There is an ex- Sepulchre. 


THE HOLY PLACES. 


445 


Nazareth at Fiume and Loretto. What, in a more 
poetical and ignorant age was in the case of the Holy 
House ascribed to the hands of angels, was actually 
intended by Sixtus V. to have been literally accomplished 
in the case of the Holy Sepulchre by a treaty with the 
Sublime Porte for transferring it bodily to Pome, so that 
Italy might then have the glory of possessing the actual 
sites of the conception, the birth, and the burial of our 
Saviour. 

III. The Holy Places which cluster within and around 
the walls of Jerusalem have been shown, age after age, 
with singular uniformity. Here and there a tradition has 
been misplaced by accident, or transposed for convenience, 
or suppressed in fear of ridicule, or, it may be, from 
sincere doubts. But, on the whole, what was shown to 
Maundeville in the fourteenth century, was with some few 
omissions shown to Maundrell in the seventeenth, and 
what Maundrell has carefully described with the dry 
humour peculiar to his age, may still be verified at the 
present time. Such localities are interesting as relics of the 
period when for the first and only time Palestine became 
a European province—as the scenes, if one may so call 
them, of some of the most celebrated works of European 
art-—as the fountain-heads of some of the most extensive 
of European superstitions. No thoughtful traveller can 
see without at least a passing emotion the various points 
in the Via Dolorosa, which have been repeated again and 
again in pictures and in calvaries, amidst the blaze of 
gorgeous colours, and on the sides of romantic hills in 
France and Italy ; the spot where Veronica is said to 
have received the sacred cloth, for which Lucca, Turin, 
and Pome contend—the threshold where is believed to 
have stood the Scala Santa, worn by the ceaseless toil of 
Roman pilgrims in front of St. John Lateran. There is, 
however, one feature common to all these lesser sanctities, 
which illustrates the general remarks already made on the 
scenery of Palestine. There are some countries, such as 
Greece, whose natural features—some cities, such as 
Pome, whose vast ruins—lend themselves with extra¬ 
ordinary facility to the growth of legends. The stalactite 


Jerusalem - . 


Lesser 

localities. 




446 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


Church 
of the 
Ascension. 


figures of the Corycian cave at once explain the origin of 
the Nymphs who are said to have dwelt there. The 
deserted halls, the subterranean houses, the endless 
catacombs of Rome, afford an ample field for the localisa¬ 
tion of the numerous persons and events with which the 
early history of the Roman Church abounds. But in 
Jerusalem it is not so. The featureless rocks without the 
walls, the mere dust and ashes 1 within, at once repel the 
attempt to amalgamate them with the fables which, by 
the very fact of their slight and almost imperceptible 
connection with the spots in question, betray their foreign 
parentage. A fragment of old sculpture lying at a house 
door is sufficient to mark the abode of Veronica ; a broken 
column, separated from its companions in a colonnade in 
the next street, is pointed out as that to which the decree 
of Pilate was affixed, or on which the cock crew; a faint 
line on the surface of a rock is the mark of the girdle 
which the Virgin dropped to convince Thomas. There is 
no attempt at fraud, or even at probability; nothing seems 
to have been too slight, too modern, for the tradition to 
lay hold of it. Criticism and belief are alike disarmed 
by the child-like, almost playful spirit, in which the early 
pilgrims and crusaders must have gone to and fro, seeking 
for places here and there, in which to localise the dreams 
of their own imaginations. 2 

From these—the mere sport and exuberance of 
monastic tradition—we pass to the more important of 
the sacred localities of Jerusalem. 

1. The present edifice of the Church of the Ascension 
on the top of Olivet has no claims to antiquity. It is a 
small octagon chapel within the court of a mosque, the 
minaret of which is ascended by every traveller for the 


1 A far wider field for such inven¬ 
tions would be open if the platform of 
the Mosque of Omar were accessible, 
as may be seen in Saewulf’s unconscious 
account of its accommodation to Chris¬ 
tian purposes during that short period 
in the twelfth centuiy when it was in 
the hands of the Crusaders (Early 
Travellers in Palestine, p. 40). The 
only professedly Christian scene which 
it is now alleged to contain, is that 


of the Presentation in the Mosque of 
Aksa. 

2 Arculf (Early Travellers in Pales¬ 
tine, p. 5) speaks of the “dust” on 
which the impression remains. And 
so also Jerome (loc. Heb.), who speaks 
of two footsteps of which the impres¬ 
sion was always carried off and always 
remained. Quaresmius (ii. 302) vainly 
endeavours to reconcile this with the 
rode. 


THE HOLY PLACES. 


447 


sake of its celebrated view over Jerusalem and the Dead 
Sea. Within the chapel is the rock which has been pointed 
out to pilgrims, at least since the seventh century, as 
imprinted with the footstep of our Saviour. There is no 
spot to which the remarks just made may be more joyfully 
applied respecting the slightness of ground on which 
these lesser traditions rest. It WQuld be painful to 
witness any mark of fraud, or even any trick of nature, 
in connection with an event like that which this rock 
professes to commemorate. Nothing but deep repulsion 
would now be excited were there, for example, any such 
mark as that which is shown in the Chapel of Domine 
Quo Yadis at Rome, or of St. Radegonde at Poitiers, 
where a well-defined footmark in the stone is supposed to 
indicate the spot where, in those two places, our Saviour 
appeared to St. Peter and St. Radegonde. Here there is 
nothing but a simple cavity in the rock, with no more 
resemblance to a human foot than to anything else. It 
must have been sought and selected in default of any¬ 
thing better; it could never either have been invented 
or have suggested the connection. 

The site is probably ancient. This doubtless is “ the 
top of the hill ” on which Helena built one of the only 
two churches which Eusebius ascribes to her (the other 
being, as we have seen, at Bethlehem)—the church whose 
glittering cross first caught the eye of the pilgrims 1 who 
approached Jerusalem from the south and west. At 
the same time there is one 2 circumstance on which 
Eusebius lays great stress, and which throws a new light 
on the special object for which this church was erected. 
That object, he tells us, as at Bethlehem, was a cave— 
a cave, as he further adds, in which “ a true tradition 
maintains that our Lord had initiated his disciples in his 
secret mysteries” before the Ascension, and to which, 
on that account, pilgrimages were in his time made from 
all parts of the Empire. It was to honour this cave, which 
Constantine himself also adorned, that Helena built a 
church on the summit of the mountain, in memory of the 


1 Hieronym. Epitaph. Paul. 

2 Euseb. Vit. Const., iii. 41, 43; Demonst. Evang., vi. 18, p. 288. 





448 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


Ascension. The cave 1 to which Eusebius refers must 
almost certainly be the same as that singular catacomb, a 
short distance below the third summit of Olivet, commonly 
called the Tombs of the Prophets, and first distinctly 
noticed by Arculf in the seventh century, to whom were 
shown within it “four stone tables, where our Lord and 
the Apostles sate.” \ In the next century the same “ four 
tables of His Supper,” were shown again to Bernard the 
Wise, who speaks of a church being erected there to com¬ 
memorate the Betrayal . 3 From that period it remained 
unnoticed till attention was again called to it by the travel¬ 
lers of the seventeenth century, in whose time it had 
assumed its present name, which it has borne ever since. 

It is clear from the language of Eusebius that the tradi¬ 
tional spot which Helena meant to honour was not the scene 
of the Ascension itself, but the scene of the conversations 
before the Ascension, and the cave in which they were 
believed to have occurred. Had this been clearly perceived, 
much useless controversy might have been spared. There 
is in fact no proof from Eusebius that any tradition pointed 
out the scene of the Ascension. Here was (as usual) the 
tradition of the cave , and nothing besides. Helena fixed 
upon the site of her church, partly from its commanding 
position, partly from its vicinity to the cave. The contra¬ 
diction of the present spot to the words of St. Luke, and 
its still more palpable contradiction to the whole character 
of the scene of the Ascension, has been already pointed 
out. Even if the Evangelist had been less explicit in 
stating that He led them out “as far as Bethany”—the 
secluded hills 4 which overhang that village on the eastern 
slope of Olivet, are evidently as appropriate to the whole 
tenor of the narrative as the startling, the almost offen- 


1 Van Egmont (374) speaks of it as 
having been first thrown open at the 
time when the graves of the Saints were 
opened by the earthquake of the Cruci¬ 
fixion. There are or were two other 
caves, those of Pelagia and of the 
“ Credo,” but these are such mere 
niches as to exclude them from Euse¬ 
bius’s description. Quaresmius alto¬ 
gether denies the cave of the Credo, and 
calls that of S. Pelagia “ angustissimus.” 


(ii. 302, 308). The Bordeaux Pilgrim 
(a. d. 333) speaks of Constantine’s 
church as being on the place where 
Christ taught before His passion. 

2 Early Travels in Palestine, p. 4. 

3 Ibid. p. 24, 

4 That especially to which Tobler 
assigns the name of Djebel Sajach 
(Siloahquelle und Oelberg, p. 84). See 
Chapter III. 


THE HOLY PLACES. 


4*9 


sive publicity of the traditional spot in the full view of the 
whole city of Jerusalem is wholly inappropriate, and (in 
the absence, as it now appears, of even traditional support) 
wholly untenable. 

2. There are few travellers whose attention has not been Tomb of 
arrested, even in the first flush of the ascent of Mount the Vlxgin ‘ 
Olivet, by the sight of a venerable chapel, approached by 
a flight of steps, which lead from the rocky roots of Olivet, 
on which it stands, and entered by yet again another and 
deeper descent, under the low-browed arches of a Gothic 
roof, producing on a smaller scale the same impression of 
awful gloom that is so remarkable in the subterranean 
Church of Assisi. This is the traditional burial-place of the 
Virgin. “ You must know,” says Maundeville, 1 “that this 
church is very low in the earth, and a part is quite within 
the earth. But I imagine that it was not founded so; but 
since Jerusalem has been so often destroyed, and the walls 
broken down, and levelled with the valley, and that they 
have been so filled again and the ground raised, for that 
reason the church is so low in the earth. Nevertheless, 
men say there commonly, that the earth hath been so ever 
since the time that our Lady was buried there, and men 
also say there that it grows and increases every day with 
out doubt.” Its history is comparatively recent. It is not 
mentioned by Jerome amongst the sacred places visited 
by Paula. And, if on such matters the authority of 
Councils is supposed to have any weight, the tomb of the 
Virgin ought to be found, not at Jerusalem, but at Ephesus, 
where it was placed by the Third Council. 2 But even the 
authority of a General Council has been unable to hold its 
ground against the later legend, which placed her death 
and burial at Jerusalem. Even the Greek peasants of 
Ephesus, though still pointing to the ruined edifice 
on the heights of Coressus, as the tomb of the Panaglna, 
have been taught to consider it the tomb of another 
Panaghia than the “ Theotocos,” in whom their great 
Council exulted. And Greeks and Latins unite in contend¬ 
ing for the possession of the rocky sepulchre at the foot of 

1 Early Travels in Palestine, p. 176. given in Mr. Williams’s Holy City, 2nd 

2 Concil. Hardouin, tom. i. pp. 143. ed. vol. ii. p. 434. 

The history of the tradition is well 

o a 


450 


SINAT AND PALESTINE. 


The Garden 
of Geth- 
semane. 


The Cce- 
naculum. 


Olivet—the scene, in the belief of both Churches, of that 
“ Assumption” which, in our later ages, has passed from 
the region of poetry and devotion into a sober and literal 
doctrine. 

Close beside the Church of the Virgin is a spot which, 
as it is omitted in Abbe Michon’s catalogue of Holy Places, 
might perhaps have been passed over ; yet a few words, 
and perhaps the fewer the better, must be devoted to the 
garden of Gethsemane. That the tradition reaches back 
to the age of Constantine is certain. How far it agrees 
with the slight indications of its position in the Gospel 
narrative will be judged by the impressions of each indi¬ 
vidual traveller. Some will think it too public ; others 
will see an argument in its favour from its close proximity 
to the brook Kedron ; none, probably, will be disposed to 
receive the traditional sites which surround it, the grotto 
of the Agony, the rocky bank of the three Apostles, the 
“terra damnata” of the Betrayal. But, in spite of all the 
doubts that can be raised against their antiquity or the 
genuineness of their site, the eight aged olive trees, if 
only by their manifest difference from all others on the 
mountain, have always struck even the most indifferent 
observers. They are now indeed less striking in the 
modern garden enclosure built round them by the 
Franciscan monks, than when they stood free and un¬ 
protected on the rough hill side; but they will remain, 
so long as their already protracted life is spared, the 
most venerable of their race on the surface of the earth; 
their gnarled trunks and scanty foliage will always be 
regarded as the most affecting of the sacred memorials in 
or about Jerusalem; the most nearly approaching to the 
everlasting hills themselves in the force with which they 
carry us back to the events of the Gospel History. 

3. On the brow of the hill now called Mount Zion, a con¬ 
spicuous minaret is pointed out from a distance to the 
traveller approaching Jerusalem from the south, as marking 
the Mosque of the Tomb of David. Within the precincts of 
that mosque is a vaulted gothic chamber, which contains 
within its four walls a greater confluence of traditions than 
any other place of like dimensions in Palestine. It is startling 


THE HOLY PLACES. 


451 


to hear that this is the scene of the Last Supper, of the 
meeting after the Resurrection, of the miracle of Pente¬ 
cost, of the residence and death of the Virgin, of the burial 
of Stephen. If one might hazard a conjecture respecting 
the cause of such a concentration of traditions, some of them 
dating as far back as the fourth century, it would be this. 
We know from Cyril and Epiphanius that a building existed 
on this spot, claiming to be the only edifice which had sur¬ 
vived the overthrow of the city by Titus. This building of 
unknown origin would naturally serve as an appropriate 
receptacle for all recollections which could not otherwise be 
attached to any fixed locality. There is one circumstance 
which, if proved, would be fatal to the claims of the “Ccena- 
culum." It stands above the vault of the traditional Tomb of 
David. It is difficult to trace back to its origin this belief, 
which, although entertained by Christians, Jews; and Mussul¬ 
mans alike, yet has given the place a special sanctity only in 
the eyes of the last. Possibly it may have been occasioned 
by a misunderstanding of St. Peter's words, “His sepulchre 
is with us (kv rjixLv) until this day;" 1 according to which, it 
might have been thought that David's Tomb was literally 
in the midst of the Pentecostal Assembly, that is, in the 
chamber now shown as the Ceenaculum. At any rate, it 
is impossible to support both claims at once. No residence, 
at the time of the Christian era, could ever have stood 
within the precincts of the Royal Sepulchre. 

4. We now approach the most sacred of all the Holy 
Places; in comparison of which, if genuine, all the rest 
sink into insignificance; the interest of which, even if 
not genuine, stands absolutely alone in the world. I 
shall not attempt to unravel the tangled controversy of 
the identity of the Holy Sepulchre. Everything which 
can be said against that identity will be found in the 
Biblical Researches of Dr. Robinson—everything which 
can be said in its favour will be found in the Holy City 
of Mr. Williams, including, as it does, the able discussion on 
the architectural history of the church by Professor Willis. 2 

1 See Thrupp’s Ancient Jerusalem, given in the eighth number of the 

p. 165 . “ Museum of Classical Antiquities,” 

2 Perhaps the most complete sum- April, 1853. 
mary of both sides of the question is 


The Church 
of the Holy- 
Sepulchre. 


o g 2 


452 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


It is enough to state that the argument mainly turns 
on the solution of two questions, one historical, the other 
topographical. The historical question rests on the value 
of the tradition that the spot was marked before the time 
of Constantine by a temple or statue of Venus, which the 
Emperor Hadrian had erected in order to pollute a spot 
already in his time regarded as sacred by the Christians. 
The topographical question is whether the present site can 
be proved to have stood without the walls of Jerusalem at 
the time of the Crucifixion. On the historical question the 
advocates of the identity of the Sepulchre never have 
fairly met the difficulty, 1 that it is hardly conceivable that 
Hadrian could have had any motive in such a purpose, 
when his whole object in establishing his new city of -Mia 
was to insult, not the Christians, but the Jews, from whom, 
in Palestine at that time, the Christians were emphatically 
divided. And it is at least curious that to the corresponding 
tradition respecting Hadrian’s temple of Adonis at Bethle¬ 
hem, there is no allusion whatever by Justin, or by Origen, 
though speaking of the very cave in which the Pagan 
temple is said to have been erected, and within a century 
of the time of its erection. In the topographical question, 
on the other hand, the opponents of the identity of the 
Sepulchre have never done justice to the argument first 
clearly stated in England by Lord Nugent, and pointedly 
brought out by Professor Willis, which is derived from the 
so-called tombs of Joseph and Nicodemus. Underneath 
the western galleries of the church, behind the Holy 
Sepulchre, are two excavations in the face of the rock, 
forming an ancient Jewish sepulchre as clearly as 
any that can be seen in the Valley of Hinnom or in the 
Tombs of the Kings. 2 That they should have been so long 
overlooked both by the advocates and opponents of the 
identity of the Holy Sepulchre, can only be accounted for 
by the perverse dulness of the conventual guides of 
the church, who point the attention of travellers and 


1 Milman’s History of Christianity, human body, it may be worth while to 

vol. i. p. 417. state that I tried the experiment and 

2 As I have seen it doubted whether found it perfectly possible, 
these tombs are capable of containing a 


THE HOLY PLACES. 


pilgrims, not to those sepulchres but to two graves sunk 
in the floor 1 in front of them—possibly, like similar exca¬ 
vations in the rocky floors at Petra, of ancient origin— 
possibly, however, as Dr. Schulz suggests, dug at a later 
time to represent the graves, when the real object of the 
ancient sepulchres had ceased to be intelligible—just as 
the tombs of some Mussulman saints are fictitious tombs 
erected over the rude sepulchres hewn in the rock beneath. 
The traditional names of Joseph and Nicodemus are of 
course valueless. But the existence of these sepulchres 
proves almost to a certainty that at some period the site 
of the present church must have been outside the walls of 
the city, and lends considerable probability to the belief 
that the rocky excavation, which perhaps exists in part 
still, and certainly once existed entire, within the marble 
casing of the chapel of the Holy Sepulchre was at any rate 
a really ancient tomb, and not, as is often rashly asserted, 
a modern structure intended to imitate it. One further 
point deserves consideration. The tradition that Adam 
or Adam's skull was buried in Golgotha seems anterior 
to the tradition of the Sepulchre itself. 2 It was suggested 
by Dr. Clarke that the curious cavity still shown as the 
site of that burial-place may have been the centre of the 
whole story. It is, at any rate, remarkable that this should 
have been the only traditional spot in connection with 
the Crucifixion pointed out in the third century. 

Farther than this in our present state of knowledge no 
merely topographical consideration can bring us. Even 
though these tombs prove the site to have been outside 
some wall, they do not prove that wall to have been the 
wall of Herod : it may have been the earlier wall of the 


1 Even Mr. Curzon, whilst arguing 
for the antiquity of these tombs, in 
his graphic account of the Church, 
speaks of them as “in the floor.” 
(Eastern Monasteries, p. 166.) One 
other slight inaccuracy may be noticed 
(p. 203), because it confuses the tenor 
of a very interesting narrative. He 
confounds “ the stone where the women 
stood during the anointing” with “ the 
stone where the Virgin stood during 
the Crucifixion.” The two spots are 
wide apart. 


2 Origen (Tract, in Matt. 35; Latin.. 
Grsec. in Matt, xxvii. 27, ed. Cramer), 
distinctly asserts that there was a 
Jewish tradition that the body of Adam 
was buried in the Place of a Skull. 
Jerome disputes the fact, from his 
notion that Adam was buried at 
Hebron. But the passage of Origen 
certainly proves that in his time 
there was in Jerusalem a place 
known by the name of Golgotha, or 
the Skull. 




454 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


The Rock of 
Golgotha. 


ancient monarchy; and, even though it be outside the 
wall of Herod, this only proves the possibility—not even 
the probability—of its identity with the scene of the 
Crucifixion. And the question whether the wall of 
Herod really ran so as just to exclude or just to include 
the present site, must depend for its solution on such 
excavations under the accumulated ruins of ages as are 
now impossible, but will doubtless in some future day 
clear up the topography of ancient Jerusalem, as they 
have in the analogous case of Rome, cleared up, beyond 
all previous expectation, the topography of the Forum. 
But, granting to the full the doubts which must always 
hang over the highest claims of the Church of the 
Sepulchre, no thoughtful man can look unmoved on what 
has, from the time of Constantine, been revered by the 
larger part of the Christian world as the scene of the 
greatest events of the world's history, and has itself in 
time become, for that reason, the centre of a second 
cycle of events of incomparably less magnitude, indeed, 
but yet of an interest in the highest degree romantic. 
It may be too much to expect that inquiring travellers, 
who see the necessary uncertainty of the whole tradition, 
should be able to partake of those ardent feelings which 
even a sceptical observer like Dr. Clarke acknowledges, 
in that striking passage which describes the entrance of 
himself and his companions into the Chapel of the 
Sepulchre. But its later associations may be felt by every 
student of history without fear of superstition or irre¬ 
verence. 

Look at it as its site was first fixed 1 by Constantine 
and his mother. Whether Golgotha were here or far 
away, there is no question that we can still trace the sweep 
of rocky hill, in the face of which the Sepulchre stood, 
as they first beheld it. 2 For if the rough limestone be 

1 This is not said in ignorance of which he chiefly relies, and which un- 
Mr. Fergusson’s ingenious, one might doubtedly is calculated to produce a 
almost say brilliant attempt to disprove great impression. But the historical 
even the Constantinian origin of the objections still seem to me insurmount- 
present site; and it is much to be wished able. 

that some competent opponent would 2 It may be well to remind the 
seriously consider the architectural argu- reader that there are two errors implied 
ment from the dome of the Sakrah, on in the popular expression “ Mount 


THE HOLY PLACfES. 


455 


disputed, which some maintain can still be felt in the 
interior of the Chapel of the Sepulchre, there can be no 
doubt of the rock which contains the “ tombs of Joseph 
and Mcodemusnone of that which in the “prison” and 
in the “ entombment of Adam’s head” marks the foot of 
the cliff of the present Golgotha; or of that which is seen 
at its summit in the so-called fissure of the “rocks rent 
by the earthquake ; ” none, lastly, of that through which 
a long descent conducts the pilgrim to the subterraneous 
chapel of the “ Invention of the Cross.” In all these 
places enough can be seen to show what the natural 
features of the places must have been before the 
“ ingenuous rock” had been “ violated by the marble” of 
Constantine ; enough to show that the church is at least 
built on the native hills of the old Jerusalem. 1 

On these cliffs have clustered the successive edifices 
of the venerable pile which now rises in almost solitary 
grandeur from the fallen city. The two domes, between 
which the Turkish sheykh was established by Saladin 
to watch the pilgrims within — the lesser dome sur¬ 
mounting the Greek church which occupies the place 
of Constantine’s basilica; the larger, that which covers 
the Holy Sepulchre itself, and for the privilege of 
repairing which France and Russia have involved the 
world in war—the Gothic front of the Crusaders, its 
European features strangely blending with the Oriental 
imagery which closes it on every side—the minaret of 
Omar 2 beside the Christian belfry, telling its well-known 
story of Arabian devotion and magnanimity—the open 
court thronged with buyers and sellers of relics to be 


Calvary.” 1. There is in the Scriptural 
narrative no mention of a mount or 
hill. 2. There is no such name as 
“ Calvary.” The passage from which 
the word is taken in Luke xxiii. 33, is 
merely the Latin translation (“ Cal¬ 
varia”) of what the Evangelist calls “ a 
skull ”— Kpaviov. 

1 Perhaps the most valuable part of 
Professor Willis’s masterly discussion 
of the whole subject is his attempt to 
restore the original form of the ground. 
(Sections 7 and 9). 

2 The minaret is said to stand on the 


spot where Omar prayed, as near the 
church as was compatible with his ab¬ 
staining from its appropriation by offer¬ 
ing up his prayers within it. The story 
is curiously illustrated by the account 
which Abb£ Michon (p. 72) gives of 
the occupation of the “ Coenaculum ” by 
the Mahometans. A few Mussulmans, 
in the last century, who were deter¬ 
mined to get possession of the convent, 
entered it on the plea of its being the 
tomb of David, said their prayers there, 
and from that moment it became a 
Mahometan sanctuary. 


The Church 
of the Holy 
Sepulchre. 




456 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


carried home to the most distant regions of the earth ; the 
bridges and walls and stairs by which the monks of the 
adjacent convents climb into the galleries and chambers 
of all kinds which run through the sacred edifice; all 
these, and many like appearances, unfold more clearly 
than any book the long series of recollections which hang 
around that tattered and incongruous mass. Enter the 
church, and the impression is still the same. There is the 
Diversity of place in which to study all the diverse rites and forms of 
the older Churches of the world. There alone are gathered 
together all the altars of all the sects which existed before 
the Reformation. On one side is the barbaric splendour 
of the Greek Church, exulting in its possession of Con¬ 
stantine’s basilica and of the rock of Calvary. In another 
corner is the deep poverty of the Coptic and Syrian 
Churches, each now confined to one paltry chapel, forcibly 
contrasted again with the large portions won by the rich 
revenues of the merchant Church of Armenia. And inter¬ 
mingled with each of these is the more chastened and 
familiar worship of the Latin Church, here reduced from the 
gigantic proportions which it bears in its native seat to a 
humble settlement in a foreign land, yet still securing for 
itself a footing, with its usual energy, even on localities 
which its rivals seemed most firmly to have occupied. 
High on the platform of Calvary, beside the Greek 
sanctuary of the Crucifixion, it has claimed a separate, 
altar for the Exaltation of the Cross. Deep in the 
Armenian chapel of St. Helena it has seated itself in the 
corner where the throne of Helena was placed during the 
“ Invention.” In the Chapel of the Holy Sepulchre itself, 
whilst the Greek Church, with its characteristic formality, 
confines its masses to the ante-chapel, where its priests 
can celebrate towards the east, the Latin Church, with 
its characteristic boldness, has rushed into the vacant 
space in the inner chapel, and regardless of all points 
of the compass, has adopted for its altar the Holy 
Tomb itself. For good or for evil—for union or for 
disunion—the older forms of Christendom are gathered 
together, as nowhere else in Europe or in Asia, within 
those sacred walls. 


THE HOLY PLACES. 


To unfold the claims of these several communions would 
be in itself a history. The apportionment of the Church of 
the Holy Sepulchre is, in fact, an epitome of the crusade 
within the Crusades which forms so curious an episode in 
that eventful drama. We are there reminded of what else 
we are apt to forget, that the chivalry of Europe were 
engaged not only in the great conflict with the followers 
of Mahomet, but also in a constant under-struggle with 
the emperors of the great city which they encountered 
in their midway progress. The capture of Constantinople 
by the Latins in the fourth Crusade was but the same 
hard measure to the Byzantine Empire, which on a smaller 
scale they had already dealt to the Byzantine Church, 
then as now the national and native Church of Pales¬ 
tine and of the East. The Crusaders, by virtue of 
their conquest, occupied the Holy Places which had before 
been in the hands of the Greeks ; and the Greeks in turn, 
when the Crusaders were ultimately expelled by the Turks, 
took advantage of the influence of wealth and neighbour¬ 
hood to regain from the Turks the share in the sanctuaries 
of which the European princes had deprived them. Copt 
and Syrian, Georgian and Armenian, have, it is true, their 
own claims to maintain, as dissenters, so to speak, against the 
great Byzantine establishment from which they have succes¬ 
sively separated. But the one standing conflict has always 
been between the descendants of the crusading invaders, 
supported by France or Spain, and the descendants of the 
original Greek occupants, supported by the great Northern 
Power which claims to have succeeded to the name and 
privileges of the Eastern Caesars. Neither party can ever 
forget that once the whole sanctuary was exclusively 
theirs, and, although France and Russia have doubtless 
pressed the claims of their respective Churches from 
political or commercial motives, yet those claims themselves 
arise from the old conflict of the two great national 
Churches of the East and West, here alone brought side 
by side within the same narrow territory. Once only 
besides has their controversy been waged in equal 
proximity, namely, when the Latin Church, headed by 
Augustine, found itself, in our own island, brought into 



458 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


abrupt collision with the customs and traditions of the 
Greeks, in the ancient British Church founded by Eastern 
missionaries. What in the extreme West was decided 
once for all by a short and bloody struggle, in Palestine 
has dragged on its weary length for many centuries. 

It would be an easy though melancholy task to tell how 
the Armenians stole the Angel’s stone from the ante-chapel 
of the Sepulchre—how the Latins procured a firman to 
stop the repairs of the dome by the Greeks—how the 
Greeks demolished the tombs of the Latin Kings, Godfrey 
and Baldwin, in the resting-place which those two heroic 
chiefs had chosen for themselves at the foot of Calvary— 
how, in the bloody conflicts at Easter, the English 
traveller was taunted by the Latin monks with eating 
the bread of their convent, and not fighting for them in 
the church—how the Abyssinian convent was left vacant 
for the Greeks in the panic raised when a drunken 
Abyssinian monk shot the Muezzin going his rounds on 
the top of Omar’s minaret—how, after the great fire of 
1808, which fire itself the Latins charge to the ambition 
of the Greek monks, two years of time, and two-thirds of 
the cost of the restoration, were consumed in the endea¬ 
vours of each party, by bribes and litigations, to overrule 
and eject the others from the places they had respectively 
occupied in the ancient arrangement of the Churches— 
how each party regards the Turk as his best and only 
protector against the other. These dissensions, however 
painful, are not without their importance, not only in 
regard to the recent troubles which have arisen from them, 
but also as illustrations of the state of feeling there pre¬ 
served, though now happily extinct in Europe, with which 
the mediaeval orders and cathedrals even of our own country 
strove by force or fraud to enrich themselves with relics 
and sanctuaries at the cost of their neighbours or rivals. 
They are instructive too, as exhibiting within a small com¬ 
pass, and in the most palpable form, the contentions and 
jealousies which, not in Palestine only, or in the middle ages, 
but from the earliest times to the present day have been 
the bane of the history of the Christian Church ; making 
common enemies dearer than rival brethren, common good 


THE HOLY PLACES. 


459 


insignificant in comparison with the special claims and 
privileges of each sect and Church. Yet let us not so 
part. Grievous as these dissensions are, their extent has 
been often exaggerated. Ecclesiastical history, after all, 
is not all controversy, nor is the area of the Church of the 
Holy Sepulchre at all times and in all places a mere battle¬ 
field of its several occupants. To the ordinary traveller it 
exhibits only the sight of all nations, kindreds, and lan¬ 
guages worshipping, each with its peculiar rites, round what 
they all believe to be the tomb of their common Lord—a 
sight edifying by the very reason of its singularity, and 
suggestive of a higher and nobler, and, perhaps the time 
may come when it may be added, a truer image of the 
Christian Church than that which is too often and too 
justly derived from the history both of holy things and 
of holy places. “ Vox quidem dissona, sed una religio. 
Tot psene psallentium chori, quot gentium diversitates.” 1 
So wrote the pilgrims of the days of Jerome ; so, from a 
higher point of view than has yet been reached, might 
be said by those who, in our days, whether at Jerusalem 
or elsewhere, can discover a common faith amidst diver¬ 
sities yet greater. 

There is one more aspect in which the Church of the 
Holy Sepulchre must be regarded. It is not merely the 
centre of the worship of Christendom, it is also in an 
especial manner the Cathedral Church of Palestine and of 
the East; and in it the local religion, which attaches to all 
the Holy Places, reaches its highest pitch, and, as is 
natural, receives its colour from the Eastern and barbarous 
nations, who necessarily contribute the chief elements to 
what may be called its natural congregation. It may be 
well, therefore, to conclude by a description of the Greek 
Easter, which will also sum up the general impressions of 
the whole building, in whose history it forms so remarkable 
a feature. The time 2 is the morning of Easter Eve, 
which, by a strange anticipation, here, as in Spain, eclipses 
Easter Sunday. The place is the great Rotunda of the 
nave ; the model of all the circular churches of Europe, 

1 Hieron. Opp. i. p. 82. p. 355), it was the 6th day after 

2 In the time of Van Egmont (Vol. i. Easter. 


Greek 

Easter. 




460 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


The Holy 
Fire. 


especially that of Aix-la-Chapelle. Above is the great 
dome with its rents and patches waiting to be repaired, 
and the sky seen through the opening in the centre, which 
here, as in the Pantheon, admits the light and air of day. 
Immediately beneath are the galleries, in one of which on 
the northern side — that of the Latin convent — are 
assembled the Frank spectators. Below is the Chapel of 
the Sepulchre—a shapeless edifice of brown marble ; on its 
shabby roof a meagre cupola, tawdry vases with tawdry 
flowers, and a forest of slender tapers ; whilst a blue 
curtain is drawn across its top to intercept the rain 
admitted through the dome. It is divided into two 
chapels—that on the west containing the Sepulchre, that 
on the east containing ‘the Stone of the Angel/ Of 
these, the eastern chapel is occupied by the Greeks and 
Armenians. On its north side is a round hole from which 
the Holy fire is to issue for the Greeks. A corresponding 
aperture is on the south side for the Armenians. At the 
western extremity of the Sepulchre, but attached to it 
from the outside, is the little wooden chapel, the only part 
of the church 1 allotted to the poor Copts ; and further 
west, but parted from the Sepulchre itself, is the still 
poorer chapel of the still poorer Syrians, happy in their 
poverty however for this, that it has probably been the 
means of saving from marble and decoration the so-called 
tombs of Joseph and Nicodemus, which lie in their pre¬ 
cincts, and on which rest the chief evidence of the genuine¬ 
ness of the whole site. 

The Chapel of the Sepulchre rises from a dense mass 
of pilgrims, who sit or stand wedged round it ; whilst 
round them, and between another equally dense mass 
which goes round the walls of the church itself, a lane is 
formed by two lines, or rather two circles, of Turkish 
soldiers stationed to keep order. For the spectacle which 
is about to take place nothing can be better suited than 
the form of the Rotunda, giving galleries above for the 
spectators, and an open space below for the pilgrims 
and their festival. For the first two hours everything is 
tranquil. Nothing indicates what is coming, except that 

1 The history of this chapel is well given in Van Egmont, vol. i. 321. 


THE HOLY PLACES. 


461 


the two or three pilgrims who have got close to the 
aperture keep their hands fixed in it with a clench never 
relaxed. 1 It is about noon that this circular lane is 
suddenly broken through by a tangled group rushing 
violently round till they are caught by one of the Turkish 
soldiers. It seems to be the belief of the Arab Greeks 
that unless they run round the Sepulchre a certain number 
of times the fire will not come. Possibly, also, there is 
some strange reminiscence of the funeral games and races 
round the tomb of an ancient chief. 2 Accordingly, the 
night before, and from this time forward for two hours, a 
succession of gambols takes place, which an Englishman 
can only compare to a mixture of prisoners’ base, football, 
and leapfrog, round and round the Holy Sepulchre. First, 
he sees these tangled masses of twenty, thirty, fifty men, 
starting in a run, catching hold of each other, lifting one 
of themselves on their shoulders, sometimes on their heads, 
and rushing on with him till he leaps off, and some one 
else succeeds ; some of them dressed in sheep-skins, some 
almost naked ; one usually preceding the rest as a fugle¬ 
man, clapping his hands, to which they respond in like 
manner, adding also wild howls, of which the chief burden 
is “ This is the tomb of Jesus Christ—God save the 
Sultan”—“Jesus Christ has redeemed us.” What begins 
in the lesser groups soon grows in magnitude and extent, 
till at last the whole of the circle between the troops is 
continuously occupied by a race, a whirl, a torrent of these 
wild figures, like the Witches’ Sabbath in “ Faust,” wheeling 
round the Sepulchre. Gradually the frenzy subsides or is 
checked ; the course is cleared, and out of the Greek 


1 The holy fire once came through 
four holes in the form of a cross, said 
to be the impression of St. George’s 
fingers. Into those holes the Greek 
and Armenian pilgrims thrust their 
hands, and shut their eyes, under the 
conviction that whoever so did would 
be saved. (Van Egmont, 308.) 

2 A curious illustration of these Arab 
races in the Church of the Sepulchre 
may be found in Tischendorf s descrip¬ 
tion of the races at the tomb of Sheykh 
Saleh (see Chapter I.), and in Jerome’s 
account of the wild fanatics, who per¬ 
formed gambols exactly similar to those 


of the Greek Easter before the re¬ 
puted tomb of John the Baptist and 
Elisha, at Samaria (see Chapter V.)— 
“ Ululare more luporum, vocibus latrare 
canum — alios rotare caput, et post 
tergum terram vertice tangere ”— (Epi¬ 
taph. Paul. p. 113.) Is it possible that 
it was to parody some such spectacles 
that the Latins held their dances at 
St. Sophia, on the capture of Constanti¬ 
nople, at the fourth Crusade? Hes- 
selquist (136) was told that they danced 
to keep the earth warm, and so to 
kindle the fire. 




462 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


Church, on the east of the Rotunda, a long procession 1 
with embroidered banners, supplying in their ritual the 
want of images, begins to defile round the Sepulchre. 

From this moment the excitement, which has before 
been confined to the runners and dancers, becomes universal. 
Hedged in by the soldiers, the two huge masses of pilgrims 
still remain in their places, all joining, however, in a wild 
succession of yells, through which are caught from time to 
time strangely, almost affectingly, mingled the chants of 
the procession—the solemn chants of the Church of Basil 
and Chrysostom, mingled with the yells of savages. Thrice 
the procession paces round ; at the third time the two lines 
of Turkish soldiers join and fall in behind. One great 
movement sways the multitude from side to side. The 
crisis of the day is now approaching. The presence of 
the Turks is believed to prevent the descent of the fire, 
and at this point it is that they are driven, or consent to 
be driven, out of the church. In a moment the confusion, 
as of a battle and a victory, pervades the church. In every 
direction the raging mob bursts in upon the troops, who pour 
out of the church at the south-east corner—the procession 
is broken through, the banners stagger and waver. They 
stagger and waver, and fall, amidst the flight of priests, 
bishops, and standard-bearers hither and thither before 
the tremendous rush. In one small but compact band the 
Bishop of Petra (who is on this occasion the Bishop of 
“ the Fire/’ the representative of the Patriarch) is hurried 
to the Chapel of the Sepulchre, and the door is closed 
behind him. The whole church is now one heaving sea 
of heads resounding with an uproar which can be compared 
to nothing less than that of the Guildhall of London at a 
nomination for the City. One vacant space alone is left; 
a narrow lane from the aperture on the north side of the 
chapel to the wall of the church. By the aperture itself 
stands a priest 2 to catch the fire ; on each side of the lane, 
so far as the eye can reach, hundreds of bare arms are 
stretched out like the branches of a leafless forest—like 
the branches of a forest quivering in some violent tempest. 

1 The procession is described by 2 In Hasselquist’s time (p. 138) an 
Richardson (ii. 330) as taking place after Armenian paid 30,000 sequins for this 
the fire. place. 


THE HOLY PLACES. 


463 


In earlier and bolder times the expectation of the 
Divine presence was at this juncture raised to a still 
higher pitch by the appearance of a dove hovering above 
the cupola of the chapel—to indicate, so Maundrell 
was told, 1 the visible descent of the Holy Ghost. This 
extraordinary act, whether of extravagant symbolism or 
of daring profaneness, has now been discontinued; but 
the belief still continues—and it is only from the know¬ 
ledge of that belief that the full horror of the scene, the 
intense excitement of the next few moments, can be 
adequately conceived. Silent—awfully silent—in the 
midst of this frantic uproar, stands the Chapel of the 
Holy Sepulchre. If any one could at such a moment be 
convinced of its genuineness, or could expect a display of 
miraculous power, assuredly it would be that its very stones 
would cry out against the wild fanaticism without, and 
wretched fraud within, by which it is at that hour desecrated. 
At last the moment comes. A bright flame as of burning 
wood appears inside the hole—the light, as every educated 
Greek knows and ackowledges, kindled by the Bishop 
within—the light, as every pilgrim believes, of the descent 
of God Himself upon the Holy Tomb. Any distinct 
feature or incident is lost in the universal whirl of excite¬ 
ment which envelops the church as slowly, gradually, the 
fire spreads from hand to hand, from taper to taper, 
through that vast multitude—till at last the whole edifice 
from gallery to gallery, and through the area below, is one 
wide blaze of thousands of burning candles. It is now 
that, according to some accounts, the Bishop or Patriarch 
is carried out of the chapel, in triumph, on the shoulders 
of the people, in a fainting state, “ to give the impression 
that he is overcome by the glory of the Almighty, from 
whose immediate presence he is believed to come/' 2 It is 
now that a mounted horseman, stationed at the gates of the 
church, gallops off with a lighted taper to communicate 
the sacred fire to the lamps of the Greek church in the 
convent at Bethlehem. It is now that the great rush to 

1 With this and one or two other almost exact transcript, of what is 
slighter variations, the account of still seen. 

Maundrell, in the 17th century, is an 2 Curzon’s Monasteries, p. 203. 



464 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


escape from the rolling smoke and suffocating heat, and to 
carry the lighted tapers into the streets and houses of 
Jerusalem, through the one entrance to the church, leads 
at times to the violent pressure which in 1834 cost the 
lives of hundreds. For a short time the pilgrims run to 
and fro—rubbing their faces and breasts against the fire 
to attest its supposed harmlessness. But the wild enthu¬ 
siasm terminates from the moment that the fire is com¬ 
municated ; and perhaps not the least extraordinary part 
of the spectacle is the rapid and total subsidence of a 
frenzy so intense—the contrast of the furious agitation of 
the morning, with the profound repose of the evening; 
when the church is once again filled—through the area 
of the Rotunda, the chapels of Copt and Syrian, the sub¬ 
terranean church of Helena, the great nave of Constan¬ 
tine’s basilica, the stairs and platform of Calvary itself, 
with the many chambers above—every part, except the 
one chapel of the Latin Church, filled and overlaid by 
one mass of pilgrims, wrapt in deep sleep and waiting for 
the midnight service. 

Such is the Greek Easter—the greatest moral argument 
against the identity of the spot which it professes to 
honour—stripped, indeed, of some of its most revolting 
features, yet still, considering the place, the time, and 
the intention of the professed miracle, probably the most 
offensive imposture to be found in the world. 

It is as impossible to give any precise account of the 
origin of this extraordinary scene as of the story of 
the transference of the House of Loretto. The explana¬ 
tion often offered, that it has arisen from a misunder¬ 
standing of a symbolical ceremony, is hardly compatible 
with its remote antiquity. As early as the ninth century 
it was believed that “ an angel came and lighted the lamps 
which hung over the Sepulchre, of which light the Patri¬ 
arch gave his share to the bishops and the rest of the 
people, that each might illuminate his own house.” 1 It 
was probably the continuation of an alleged miraculous 

the lighting of the lamps on Easter Eve 
at Jerusalem, as early as the 2nd cen¬ 
tury. Euseb. H. E. vi. 9. 


1 Bernard the Wise, a.d. 867. (Early 
Travels in Palestine, p. 26.) There is a 
story of a miraculous supply of oil for 


THE HOLY PLACES. 


465 


appearance of fire in ancient times—an appearance sug¬ 
gested, it may be, in part by some actual phenomenon in 
the neighbourhood, such as that which is mentioned in the 
account by Ammianus of Julian's rebuilding the Temple— 
in part also by the belief found at many of the tombs of 
Mussulman saints, that on every Friday a supernatural 
light blazes in their sepulchres, which supersedes all neces¬ 
sity of lamps, and dazzles all beholders. 1 It is a remark¬ 
able instance of a great, it may almost be said an awful 
superstition, gradually deserted by its supporters, yet still 
maintained for the sake of the multitude. 2 Originally all 
the Churches partook in the ceremony, but one by one 
they have fallen away. The Roman Catholics, after their 
exclusion from the church by the Greeks, denounced it as 
an imposture, and have never since resumed it. Only 
inferior to the delight of the Greek pilgrims at receiving 
the fire, is the delight of the Latins in deriding what, in 
the “ Annals of the Propagation of the Faith," they describe 
(forgetful of the past and of S. Januarius at Naples) as a 
“ ridiculous and superstitious ceremony." “ Ah ! vedete 
la fantasia," exclaim the happy Franciscans in the Latin 
Gallery. “ Ah ! qual fantasia!—ecco gli bruti Greci— 
noi non facciamo cosi.” Next, the grave Armenians 
deserted, or only with great reluctance acquiesced in, 
what they too regarded as a fraud. And lastly, unless 
they are greatly misrepresented, the enlightened members 
of the Greek Church itself, 3 including, it is said, no less a 
person than the late Emperor Nicholas, would gladly dis¬ 
continue the ceremony, could they but venture on such a 
shock as this step would give to the devotion and faith of 


1 See Chapters VI. and XII. 

2 A complete history of the Holy 
Fire is given in a Latin essay by Mos- 
heim, “De Lumine Sancti Sepulchri,” 

1736. It appears from his statement 
that it began in the 9 th century—that 
from the 9th to the 12th century it was 
effected by some preparation which 
kindled the lights in the church simul¬ 
taneously, and that the present mode 
of kindling it within the chapel began 
from the 12th century. He compares 
it to a strange ceremony in Mingrelia, 


where a sacred bull is once a year 
covertly introduced into the Church of 
St. George, and there exhibited to the 
eyes of the pilgrims as having been mira¬ 
culously transported thither through 
closed doors by St. George himself. 

3 An exiled patriarch of Constanti¬ 
nople told Van Egmont, in the Convent 
of Mount Sinai, that he had declined 
the patriarchate of Jerusalem from his 
unwillingness to take part in what he 
regarded as a fraud. (Van Egmont, 355.) 

H H 


466 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


the thousands who yearly come from far and near, over 
land and sea, for this sole object. 

It is doubtless a miserable thought that for such an 
end as this Constantine and Helena planned and builded 
—that for such a worship as this, Godfrey and Tancred, 
Richard and St. Louis, fought and died. Yet in justice to 
the Greek clergy it must be remembered that this is but 
the most extreme and the most instructive case of what 
every Church must suffer which has to bear wdth the 
weakness and fanaticism of its members, whether brought 
about by its own corruption or by long and inveterate 
ignorance. And however repulsive to our European minds 
may be the orgies of the Arab pilgrims, we ought rather 
perhaps to wonder that these wild creatures should be 
Christians at all, than that being such they should take 
this mode of expressing their devotion at this great anni¬ 
versary. The very violence of the paroxysm proves its 
temporary character. On every other occasion their con¬ 
duct is sober and decorous, even to dulness, as though— 
according to the happy expression of one of the most 
observant of Eastern travellers 1 —they 4 were not working 
out, but transacting the great business of salvation.' 

It may seem to some a painful, and perhaps an unex¬ 
pected conclusion, that so great an uncertainty should 
hang over spots thus intimately connected with the 
great events of the Christian religion,—that in none the 
chain of tradition should be unbroken, and in most cases 
hardly reach beyond the age of Constantine. Is it possible, 
it is frequently asked, that the disciples of the first age 
should have neglected to mark and commemorate the 
scenes of such events 1 And the answer, though often 
given, cannot be too often repeated, that it not only was 
possible, but precisely what we should infer from the 
absence of any allusion to local sanctity in the writings of 
the Evangelists and Apostles, who were too profoundly 
absorbed in the events themselves to think of their locali¬ 
ties, too wrapt in the spirit to pay regard to the letter or 
the place. The loss of the Holy Sepulchre thus regarded, 


i Eotheu, p. 137—143. See Chapter VII. 


THE HOLY PLACES. 


467 


is a testimony to the greatness of the Resurrection. The 
loss of the Manger of Bethlehem is a witness to the 
universal significance of the Incarnation. The sites which 
the earliest followers of Our Lord would not adore, their 
successors could not. The obliteration of the very marks 
which identified the Holy Places was effected a little later 
by what may without presumption be called the Providen¬ 
tial events of the time. The Christians of the second 
generation of believers, even had they been anxious to 
preserve the collection of sites familiar to their fathers, 
would have found it in many respects impossible after 
the ruin of Jerusalem by Titus. The same judgment 
which tore up by the roots the local religion of the Old dis¬ 
pensation, deprived of secure basis what has since grown up 
as the local religion of the Hew. 1 The total obliteration of 
the scenes in some instances is at least a proof that no 
Divine Providence, as is sometimes urged, must have 
watched over them in others. The desolation of the Lake 
of Gennesareth has swept out of memory places more sacred 
than any that are alleged to have been preserved. The Cave 
of Bethlehem and the House of Nazareth, where our Lord 
passed an unconscious infancy and an unknown youth, 
cannot be compared for sanctity with that “ House” of 
Capernaum which was the home of His manhood and the 
chief scene of His words and works. Yet of that sacred 
habitation every vestige has perished as though it had 
never been. It is a certain fact, and one dwelt upon with 
considerable emphasis by the Sacred historian, that “ of the 
sepulchre of Moses no man knoweth unto this day.” 2 It 
is conjectured with some probability by the only European 
who has thoroughly investigated 3 the tomb of Mahomet at 
Medina, that this, too, is a later fiction, and that in the first 
fervour of the Mussulman faith the burial-place of the 
Prophet was left unknown. Is it surprising that the causes 
which thus obscure the local reminiscences of the first 


1 “ Fast as evening sunbeams from the 2 See Chapters II. and VII. 

sea, 3 See Burton’s Pilgrimage to Mecca 

Thy footsteps all in Sion's ‘deep decay' and Medina, ii. pp. 109, 314. 

Were blotted from the ground.”— 

Christian Year. Monday before Easter. 


h h 2 


468 


SINAI AND PALESTINE. 


beginnings of Judaism and Islamism should have had still 
greater weight in covering with a like uncertainty the 
cradle and the sepulchre of Gospel History. 

But the doubts which envelop the lesser things do not 
extend to the greater,—they attach to the “ Holy Places/’ 
hut not to “the Holy Land.” The clouds which cover 
the special localities are only specks in the clear light 
which invests the general geography of Palestine. Not 
only are the sites of Jerusalem, Nazareth, and Bethlehem 
absolutely indisputable, but, as we have seen, there is 
hardly a town or village of note mentioned in the Old and 
New Testament which cannot still be identified with a cer¬ 
tainty which often extends to the very spots which are 
signalised in the history. If Sixtus V. had succeeded in his 
project of carrying off the Holy Sepulchre, the essential 
interest of Jerusalem would have suffered as little as that of 
Bethlehem by the alleged transference of the manger to S. 
Maria Maggiore, or as that of Nazareth, were we to share 
the belief that its holy house were standing far away on 
the hill of Loretto. The very notion of the transference 
being thought desirable or possible, is a proof of the slight 
connection existing in the minds of those who entertain it 
between the sanctuaries themselves and the enduring 
charm which must always attach to the real scenes of 
great events. It shows the difference (which is often con¬ 
founded) between the local superstition of touching and 
handling, of making topography a matter of religion— 
and that reasonable and religious instinct which leads us 
to investigate the natural features of historical scenes, 
sacred or secular, as one of the best helps to judging of 
the events of which they were the stage. 

These “ Holy Places” have, indeed, a history of their 
own, which, whatever be their origin, must always give 
them a position amongst the celebrated spots which have 
influenced the fortunes of the globe. The convent of 
Bethlehem can never lose the associations of Jerome, nor 
can the Church of the Holy Sepulchre ever cease to be 
bound up with the recollections of the Crusades, or with 
the tears and prayers of thousands of pilgrims, which, of 
themselves, amidst whatever fanaticism and ignorance, 


THE HOLY PLACES. 


469 


almost consecrate the walls within which they are offered. 
But these reminiscences, and the instruction which they 
convey, bear the same relation to those awakened by the 
original and still living geography of Palestine as the later 
course of Ecclesiastical history bears to its divine source. 
The Church of the Holy Sepulchre, in this as in other 
aspects, is a type of the History of the Church itself, and 
the contrast thus suggested is more consoling than melan¬ 
choly. Alike in Sacred Topography and in Sacred History, 
there is a wide and free atmosphere of truth above, a firm 
ground of reality beneath, which no doubts, controversies, 
or scandals, concerning this or that particular spot, this or 
that particular opinion or sect, can affect or disturb. The 
Churches of the Holy Sepulchre or of the Holy House may 
be closed against us, but we have still the Mount of Olives 
and the Sea of Galilee : the sky, the flowers, the trees, 
the fields, which suggested the Parables,—the holy hills, 
which cannot be moved, but stand fast for ever. 









APPENDIX. 


VOCABULARY OF TOPOGRAPHICAL WORDS. 

In the foregoing chapters I have often had occasion to refer 
to the richness and precision of the local vocabulary of the 
Hebrew language. In the Authorised Version this is unfor¬ 
tunately lost; not so much by the incorrect rendering of any 
particular word, as by the promiscuous use of the same English 
word for different Hebrew words, or of different English words 
for the same Hebrew word. It has been my endeavour to 
supply this defect, by substituting in all cases one uniform 
rendering in the passages quoted. But, in order to justify 
and explain these slight changes, I have thought it best to 
append a list of the topographical words used in the Hebrew 
Scriptures, with a brief account of. their exact meaning, as 
fixed by the root of the word, or, if possible, by actual 
examples of the thing described. 

Such an inquiry is the more interesting, in a language so 
primitive, and in a nomenclature so expressive, as that of the 
Hebrews. The geographical passages of the Bible seem to 
shine with new light, as these words acquire their proper 
force. How keenly, for example, are we led to notice the 
early tendency to personify and treat as living creatures the 
great objects of nature, when we find that the “ springs ” are 
‘the eyes/—the bright, glistening, life-giving eyes of the 
thirsty East; that the mountains have not merely summits 
and sides, but 4 heads/ 4 shoulders/ 4 ears/ 4 ribs/ 4 loins/ How 



472 


APPENDIX. 


strongly the character of Eastern scenery is brought out, when 
we discover that, for ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, where 
the Authorised Version reads “ river,” we ought to read ‘ dry 
watercourse ; 9 and how grandly does the Euphrates stand 
out, when we find that he is emphatically “ The Biver” of Asia ; 
and the Nile, when we find that he has his own peculiar name, 
never applied to any lesser stream. How powerfully is the cave 
life of the Israelite history illustrated by the numerous words 
for the cavities in rocks ; the absence of sea life by the few 
words for “ bay 99 or “ harbour.” What a picture is held out 
to us, as we glance over the names of the several towns and 
cities in the allocation of the tribes by Joshua, and see that, 
in Judaea, the “ Hazer ” or Bedouin village hangs everywhere 
on the frontier; that the remnants of the lairs of wild beasts 
linger in the towns of the interior; that “ terebinth ” and 
“ forest ” grew once where they have long since vanished ; 
that the “tents” are still found in Havoth Jair beyond the 
Jordan. How clearly are the natural divisions of the country 
exhibited, as we see the often-repeated arrangement of Pales¬ 
tine into “ the country of the ‘ mountains/ ” [of Judah, 
Ephraim, and Naphtali], the “south” [of the frontier], and 
“the low country” [of Philistia], and the “issuings forth of 
the springs” [of Pisgah],—or again, the “desert” [of the 
Jordan], the “sea-shore” [of the Phoenician plain,]—or again, 
“the circles,” or “the round” [of the oases of the Jordan], 
and the “level downs” [of the Transjordanic table-lands]. 
Many are the events of which the scene is fixed by the precise 
mention of “ the mountain ” instead of “ the hill,” or of “ the 
hill ” instead of “ the mountain ; ” “ the spring ” for “ the well,” 
or “ the well ” for “ the spring ; ” the “ river ” for “ the tor¬ 
rent,” or “ the torrent ” for “ the river.” Many are the images 
which come out with double force from perceiving their original 
local meaning ; as when “ the valley of the shadow of death ” 
is seen to be a narrow c ravine/ where the shade of the 
closing rocks is never absent. 

So also by restoring the definite article, which the English 
translators—whether following the Vulgate or for other reasons 
which cannot here be examined—too often neglected, the loca¬ 
lity which would else be passed by as unknown, comes out 




APPENDIX. 


473 


clothed with a long train of venerable recollections, or distin¬ 
guished by some remarkable feature. Thus we shall find that 
the spot by which “ the angel of the Lord found ” Hagar 
was not merely “a fountain of water,” as we read in our 
version, but a well-known spot, £ the spring ’ of water in the 
wilderness—“ the £ spring 9 in the way to Shur,” which probably 
refreshed the traveller in the desert in times long after. Thus 
4 the ’ solitary oak of Deborah stands out as a landmark to our 
eyes (Gen. xxxv. 8) ; and we perceive that the tree in which 
Absalom met his death, was evidently a tree of note even 
amongst the forests of Gilead, not only held in remembrance 
at the date of the composition of the history, but well known 
before the occurrence, as is proved by the fact that it is not 
only called £< £ the 9 great £ terebinth 9 99 in the narrative, but 
that the same form is used by Joab's informant— ££ A certain 
man told Joab, I saw Absalom hanging in £ the terebinth 
(2 Sam. xviii. 19, 20). 

Finally, it is instructive to observe the tenacity with which 
these local designations have in some instances survived even 
to this day in the native Arabic. The valley of Ccele-Syria 
is still called by the same peculiar word for £ plain 9 which 
it bore in the time of Amos : and the desert valley of the 
Dead Sea has never lost its name of e Arabah/ 

All these points, which have been briefly intimated in the 
general sketch, will be stated at length in the following Cata¬ 
logue. I have here to repeat my obligations to Mr. Grove, 
for his kindness in arranging, verifying, and enlarging the 
materials of this Appendix. 


474 


APPENDIX. 


VOCABULARY, &c. 


1. No attempt has been made to express the exact force of the Hebrew 
consonants and vowels beyond a uniform rendering of the same Hebrew by 
the same English letter. Thus n is throughout H ; t is Z ; n is Ch, with the 
guttural sound which it has in the Scottish loch and the German ich; ’ is 
J pronounced like Y, as in German, Jesu, Jahr; j is C hard as in come ; 2 is 
Tz ; p is K; v is S ; xo Sh ; and v is not rendered at all. With regard to the 
vowels it is only necessary to say generally that they should be pronounced 
rather as in German than as in English, with a full broad sound. The only 
exception is in the case of T which is denoted by (’) so as to throw the accent 
strongly on the following syllable: thus—nbeti Sh’-phelah. 

2. Unless indicated to the contrary, the derivations and meanings of the 
words are those of Gesenius as given in his Thesaurus Linguce Hebrcece , 4to, * 
Leipzig, 1829—42. The Handworterbuch of Dr. Julius Fiirst, now in course 
of publication (8vo. Leipzig, Tauchnitz), has been referred to when possible. 

3. The Greek quotations, unless otherwise noted, are from the Yatican 
codex of the LXX, in the edition of Van Ess (Leipzig, Tauchnitz, 1835). 
Where the readings of the Alexandrian MSS. differ from these and have 
seemed worthy of notice, they are distinguished by the prefix of Alex, and 
are taken from the folio of Grabe (Oxford, 1707—9). Aq., Symm., Theod ., 
denote the versions of Aquila, Symmachus, and Theodotion, as given in 
Bahrdt’s edition of the fragments of Origen’s Hexapla (2 vols. 8vo, Leipzig, 
1770). The very few citations from the Targum and the Samaritan version 
have been taken from Walton’s Polyglott. The Latin quotations from the 
Vulgate—always in italics—are from the beautiful edition of Van Ess (3 vols. 
8vo, Tubingen, 1824). Occasional reference is made to the German version 
of De Wette (Heidelberg, 1839); to that edited by Dr. Zunz—Old Testament 
only—(Berlin, 1848); and to the version of Isaiah by Gesenius (Leipzig, 1829). 
The edition of Ewald’s Geschichte referred to is the second. 

4. The words between double inverted commas, as “ palaces,” are invariably 
quotations from the Text of the English Authorized Version ; while the single 
commas, as ‘ cliff,’ are exclusively employed to indicate the variations from 
that Text consequent on the new rendering of the topographical words. Thus 
“the crag of the ‘cliff’” denotes that the passage is quoted from the 
Authorized Version (Job xxxix. 28), but that the word ‘ cliff’ is substituted 
for the “ rock ” there found, as being a more accurate rendering of the 
Hebrew word Sela (see § 29 e). In like manner “the valley of ‘the Tere¬ 
binth,”’ denotes that ‘the Terebinth’ is substituted for “Elah” of the 
English Bible (1 Sam. xvii. 2, § 72). 

5. The passages quoted under each head are intended to be a complete list 
of all the occurrences of the word in the Old Testament. Where this is the 
case the word [All] will be found subjoined (see §§ 1, 2, &c.) But when the 
occurrences have been too numerous for entire quotation, the word All is 
omitted, indicating that a selection only has been given. 

6. Throughout the compilation of this Catalogue, great assistance has 
been derived from the very accurate Concordance of Mr. Wigram, (“ The 
Englishman’s Hebrew and Chaldee Concordance,” 2 vols. Longman, 1843.) 



APPENDIX. 


475 


INDEX TO VOCABULARY. 

— ♦— 


I. — Valleys , Tracts of Land , dc. 

III .—Rivers and Streai 

1. Emek .... 


35. Nahar. . . 



2. Gai .... 


a. Jad . . 


. side. 

3. Shaveh . . . 


b. Saphah . 


. brink. 

4. Metzoolah 

. . . bottom. 

c. Lashon . 


. tongue. 

5. Bikah .... 


d. Gedoth . 


. banks. 

6. Mishor . . . 


e. Katzeh . 


. end. 

7. Sharon. 


/. Maavar . 


. ford. 

8. Shephelah . . 

. . . low country. 

36. Jeor 


. . Nile. 

9. Midbar 

. . . wilderness. 

37. Shichor . . 


. . Nile. 


10. Arabah.desert. 

11. Jeshimon.waste. 

12. Ciccar.round. 

13. Geliloth.circles. 

14. Carmel.park. 

15. Sadeh.field. 

16. Shedemoth.fields. 

17. Abel.meadow. 

18. Achu.reeds. 

19. Maareh.open field. 

20. Chelkah.plot. 

21. Naphot.region. 

22. Chebel.district. 


II.— Mountains , dc. 


23. Har 


a. 

Rosh . . 

. head. 

51. Ain . . 


. spring. 

b. 

Aznoth . 

. ears. 

52. Ma-an . 


. 

c. 

Cataph . 

. shoulder. 

53. Motza . 


. springhead. 

d. 

Tzad 

. side. 

54. Makor . 


. well-spring. 

e. 

Shecem . 

. back. 

55. Gulloth . 


. bubblings. 

f. 

Tzelah 

. rib. 

a. Gal. 



g. 

Chisloth . 

. loins. 

56. Mabbooa 


. gushing spring. 

h; 

Ammah . 

. elbow. 

57. Beer . . 


. well. 

i. 

Jerecataim 

. flanks. 

58. Agam 


. pond. 

Tc. 

Sether 

. “covert.” 

59. Mikveh . 


. reservoir. 


24. Pisgah 

25. Gibeah 

26. Opbel . . 

27. Shefi . . 

28. Tzur . . 

a. Nikerab. 

29. Sela . . 

a. Chagavim 

b. Seiph . 

c. Tzecbiacb 

d. Nekik 

e. Shen . 

30. Cephim . 

31. Misgab 

32. Arootz 

33. Maaleh 

34. Morad 


mountain. 


38. Jarden . 

39. Nacbal . 

40. Peleg 

41. Mical 

42. Tealab . 

43. Jooyal . 

44. Aphik. . 

45. Zerem . 

46. Nazal 

47. Shibboleth 

48. Eshed ; Ashdoth. 

49. Mabbool 

50. Sheteph 


. ‘theheight.’ 
. hill. 

. mound. 

. bare hill. 

. rock. 

. hole. 

. cliff. 


chasms, 
cleft, 
top. 
cranny, 
crag. 


. rocks. 

. lofty rock. 


60. Berecah 

61. Ceroth . 

62. Miereh . 

63. Mashabim 

64. Bor . . 

65. Pachath 

66. Geb . . 

67. Shuchah 

68. Goommatz 

69. Mahamoroth 


. Jordan. 

. torrent. 

. stream. 

. brook. 

. conduit. 

. flood-stream. 

. body of water. 


. The Deluge. 
. flood. 


IV.— Springs, Wells , and Pits. 


pool, 
dug wells, 
pit. 

troughs. 

cistern, pit. 

hollow. 

ditch. 

pitfall. 

sunk-pit. 

whirlpools. 


V,— Caves. 


asceat. 

descent 


70. Mearah . . 

71. Chor . . 

72. Mechilloth . 

73. Minharoth . 


cave. 

hole. 

fissures. 

burrows. 











































476 


APPENDIX. 


YI .—Forests and Trees. 

74. Choresh .... wood. 

75. Jaar.forest. 

76. Pardes.plantation. 

77. Etz.tree. 

78. El; Allon; Elah . . oak, terebinth. 

79. Eshel.tamarisk. 

Askrah.“Grove.” 

VII. — Cities, Habitations, dkc. 

80. Ir.city. 

81. Kir.wall. 

82. Kirjath.city. 

83. Birak.palace. 

84. Aremon.keep. 

a. Haremon. 

85. Chatzer.enclosure. 

86. Ckavvoth .... tent-villages. 

87. Cephar.hamlet. 

88. Tirah.Bedouin castle. 


89. Perazoth .... unwalled villages. 

90. Beth.house. 

91. Soc; Succoth . . . booth. 

92. Mivtzar.fortress. 

a. Bittzaron. 

93. Maoz.stronghold. 

94. Maon.den. 

95. Metzad.lair. 

96. Metzoorah .... fort. 

97. Mistar.hiding-place. 

98. Meoorah .... aperture. 

VIII.— The Sea and its Waves. 

99. Jam 

100. Choph. 

101. Miphratz 

102. Machoz 

103. Gal. . 

104. Daci 

105. Mishbar 

106. Bamah. 


. sea shore. 
. bay. 

. haven. 

^j> wave. 


VOCABULARY. 


I.—VALLEYS, TRACTS OE LAND, &c. 

§ 1 . 

EMEK, ‘ a valley’—from pos to be deep, unexplored: used however not so 

much in the sense of depression as of lateral extension, like fiaOela av\r], 
II. v. 142, and as we speak of a ‘ deep ’ as opposed to a ‘ shallow,’ house. And 
thus the word is not applied to ravines, but to the long broad sweeps sometimes 
found between parallel ranges of hills. Such is “ the valley of Jezreel,” between 
Gilboa and Little Hermon. Assuming the above to be the correct meaning 
of the word, it would seem that the “ Valley of Jehoshaphat” (Joel iii. 2, 12), 
is not the narrow glen between Olivet and Moriah, to which the name is now 
applied. 

The Emeks of Palestine named in the Bible, are as follows:— 

1. “The vale of Siddim,” (i. e. ‘of the fields,’ seeSadeh.) Gen. xiv. 3, 8, 10, 
LXX, <papay£ aXvK'fj, KoiXas i] aXvK'f], 

2. “The valley of Shaveh, which is the king’s dale,” (see Shaveh), Gen. xiv. 17, 
T7JV KOiXaba rod 2a/3u' rovro i )v rb tt ebiov ruv fiacriAeuv. 

3. “The vale of Hebron,” Gen. xxxvii. 14. n KoiXas rrjs Xefipwt'. 

4. “The valley of Achor,” (‘of trouble’). Josh. vii. 24, 26, xv. 7 ; Isa. lxv. 10 ; 
Hos. ii. 15. ’A x^Pt and ’E/xe/cax^p, and (papaya ax&p. 

5. “The valley of Ajalon.” Josh. x. 12. Kara (papayya alXuv. 

6. “The valley of Bephaim,” (‘of giants’). Josh. xv. 8; xviii. 16; 2 Sam. 
v. 18, 22 ; xxiii. 13 ; 1 Chron. xi. 15; xiv. 9, 13; KoiXas rwv nravwv, paucity, 
and yiydvrwv. Isa. xvii. 5. iv <pa.pa.yyi arepea. 

7. “The valley of Jezreel.” Josh. xvii. 16 ; Jud. vi. 33 ; vii. 1, 8, 12 ; Hos. i, 5. 
KoiXas Te|paeA. Probably this is the valley named in 1 Sam. xxxi. 7, and 1 
Chron. x. 7. 

8. “The valley of Keziz.” Josh, xviii. 21. 'AfxzKaois. 


























APPENDIX. 


477 


9. “The valley that [lieth] by Beth-rebob, ’ in which Laish or Dan was situated. 
Jud. xviii. 28. KoiXds. 

10. “The valley of Elah,” (ntan % ‘of the Terebinth’). 1 Sam. xvii. 2, 19, 
xxi. 9. kolXcis rrjs repefifaOov : rrjs dpvos : ’HAS. 

11. “The valley of Berachah,” (‘of blessing’). 2 Chron. xx. 26. rbv avXuva rrjs 
evXoyias, also KoiXds. 

12. “The valley of Baca,” 'y, ‘of weeping’). Ps. lxxxiy. 6. KoiXas rod 

KXavdfxwi/os. 

13. “ The valley of Succoth.” Ps. cviii. 7, lx. 6. KoiXas ruu (Tkt)vG)v. 

14. “The valley of Gribeon.” Isa. xxviii. 21. (papayt yafiadv. Probably the 
valley of Ajalon (5). 

15. “ The valley of Jehoshaphat.” Joel iii. 2, 12. KoiXas’luxrcKpdr. 

16. “The valley of ‘the’ decision,” (or of Charutz. ynnn 'y). Joel iii. 14. y 
KoiXds rrjs diKrjs. 

In Josh. xix. 27, we have Beth-emek, ‘house of the valley.’ 

The word also is used without special designation, in Numb. xiv. 25 ; 
Josh. viii. 13 ; xiii. 19, 27 ; Jud. i. 19, 34, v. 15; 1 Sam. vi. 13 (Bethshemesh); 
2 Sam. xviii. 18 (“ dale”); 1 Kings xx. 28 ; 1 Chron. xii. 15 ; xxvii. 29 ; Job 
xxxix. 10, 21; Psalm lxv. 13; Cant. ii. 1; Isaiah xxii. 7; Jer. xxi. 13; 
xxxi. 40 ; xlvii. 5 ; xlviii. 8 ; xlix. 4 ; Micah i. 4. 

In these cases it is most frequently rendered by the LXX by KoiXds — but 
also by <papay£, 7re5fov, and avXdv. In Josh. XV. 8, it is e/c yepovs yr/s 'P acpatv —• 
as if Ge, a ravine, had been read for Emek, and been literally rendered, 
having afterwards been taken to be yrj, the earth, and put into the genitive 
case accordingly. In Jer. xxxi. 40, the Hebrew is literally rendered by KoiXds 
(payapelp.. In Jer. xlvii. 5 and xlix. 4, the LXX appear to have read p:s Anak, 
for pos Emek, for they render these passages, ot KaraXonroi ’E vanip., and ro?s 
ireStois ’Ei/aicdfx. Comp. Josh. xiii. 19, iv rep Spsi*Evaic. [all] 


§ 2 . 

GAI, N?2, also and GE, and M'S, ‘a ravine:’ possibly from the same root as 
ycua, yrj, Germ. Gau, in the general sense of flatness : but rather from rpa, to 
break out, used of water bursting forth in Job xx xviii. 8, and Ezek. xxxii. 2. 
By this word, too, are designated actual gorges, really or apparently formed by 
a burst of water, such as the Sik at Petra (see Chap. I. p. 90). Hence Gihon, 
the second river of Paradise; and also the spring or reservoir near Jerusalem, 
in all probability at the mouth of the Ge-Hinnom,—the narrow glen of Hinnom, 
—south of the city, which affords the best instance of the meaning of the word. 
There is one passage where Emek and Gai seem to be used couvertibly. In 
1 Sam. xvii. 2, “ Saul pitched in the valley (Emek) of ‘ the Terebinth,’ ” which 
in the following verse seems to be described as ‘ the ravine ’ (Gai) 6 avXchu . But 
probably a closer inspection of the locality would show (what indeed a closer 
inspection of the text suggests) that the ravine between the two armies was 
the glen into which the valley contracted in its descent towards the plain of 
Philistia, and through which (xvii. 52, Gai again) the routed army fled on 
their way to Ekron. 

The name Gai is given to several localities of Palestine: these are :— 

1. “The valley, in the ‘field’of Moab,” “over against Beth-Peor,” in which Moses 
was buried. Numb. Xxi. 20 ; Dent. iii. 29 ; iv. 46 ; xxxiv. 6. 

2. “The valley of Hinnom,” or “ of the son,” or “ the children of Hinnom.” Josh. xv. 8; 
xviii. 16 ; 2 Kings xxiii. 10 ; 2 Chron. xxviii. 3, xxxiii. 6 ; Neh. xi. 30 ; Jer. vii. 
31, 32 ; xix. 2, 6; xxxii. 35. Probably Isa. xxii. 1, 5. 

This ravine also gave its name to the “ valley-gate ” of Jerusalem. 2 Chron. 
xxvi. 9 ; Neh. ii. 13, 15, iii. 13. 


478 


APPENDIX. 


3. “ The valley of Jiphthah-el,” lying on the border between Zebulun and Asher. Josh, 
xix. 14, 27. 

4. “The valley of Zeboim” (hyaenas). 1 Sam. xiii. 18. (See Neh. xi. 34.) 

5. “ The valley of salt, 5 ’ a ravine in the neighbourhood of Sela, in which David and Amaziah 
defeated and killed large numbers of the Edomites. 2 Sam. viii. 13 ; 1 Chron. 
xviii. 12 ; 2 Kings xiv. 7 ; 2 Chron. xxv. 11 ; Ps. lx. title. 1 

6. “ The valley of Zephathah.” 2 Chron. xiv. 10. 

7. “The valley of Charashim,” 1 Chron. iv. 14, or “of craftsmen,” Neh. xi. 35. 

8. “The valley of the Passengers,” (or of Oberim). Ezek. xxxix. 11. 

9. “The valley of Hamon-gog.” Ezek. xxxix. 11, 15. 

10. “ The valley ,” lying on the north side of Ai. Josh. viii. 2; see Chap. IV. 

11. “ Some valley ,” near the Jordan, in which the sons of the Prophets sought Elijah, after 
his ascent to Heaven. 2 Kings ii. 16—perhaps the one just mentioned, more probably 
on the east of the Jordan. 

12. “ The valley” of Gedor 2 3 (LXX Gerar ; Tipapa, ecus ruv avaroXuv rrjs Tat) whence 
the Simeonites drove the children of Ham. 1 Chron. iv. 39. 

The word is used without any special application, in Psalm xxiii. 4 
(“ the valley of the shadow of death ”); Isa. xxviii. 1, 4; xl. 4; Jer. ii. 23 ; 
Ezek. vi. 3; vii. 16; xxxi. 12 ; xxxii. 5; xxxv. 8; xxxvi. 4, 6 ; Micah 
i. 6 ; Zech. xiv. 4, 5. 

The LXX have commonly rendered Gai by <papay£ —hut also by vdiwy, KoiXds, 
and avxdv. They have in several cases expressed it by yy, as iv yy iwo/x or 
yfj fevewo/x, In 2 Kings ii. 16, it is strangely translated iQow6s. [all] 


§ 3 . 

SHAVEH, a dale or level spot: from to make level (Isaiah xxviii. 25). 

The word only occurs twice—for two places apparently east of the Jordan. 
(1) Gen. xiv. 5, Shaveh-kiriathaim—the dale of (or near) Kirjathaim, ‘the 
double city,’ therefore in the district afterwards taken by Reuben (Numb, 
xxxii. 37). LXX, iv l,avfj Trj 7rdAet. (2) Gen. xiv. 17. “ The valley of 

Shaveh, 4 which is the ‘ valley’ of the King,” rV KoiXdSa rod 2a/3v (Alex. 
tV Savyv : Yers. Yenet. ryv foyv) tovto ?)V rb neblov ruv finer iXiuv (Alex. 
finer iXias). In 2 Sam. xviii. 18, where ‘ the valley of the King’ is mentioned, 
the word Shaveh is not used. r a iil 


§ 4 . 

M’TZULLAH, ‘dell’ or ‘bottom:’ from fts, hidden in shade. Occurs 

only in Zech. i. 8, probably for a secluded part of the ravine of the Kedron, 
containing a myrtle grove (see p. 144 note.) Jerome, in profundo. 


§ 5 . 

BIK J AH, nypSl, ‘ a plain’—properly a plain between mountains: from 2p_|, to rend. 
But it differs from Gai—which seems to be derived from a similar" idea—in 
this respect, that the rent implied in Gai is one of comparatively modern 


1 See Chapter I. part ii. p. 95. 

2 See Ewald, Geschichte, i. 322, note. 

3 In this text, Zech. xiv. 4, it is used 
for the cleft which is represented as rending 

Mount Olivet in twain, as if with another 


ravine like that of Kedron or Hinnom. 

4 Shaveh may be an older word than Emek, 
in which case this sentence is parallel to the 
expression, the Lalce of Winder-wicrg ; the 
Valley of Ycm^-gwynant ; Peel-castle. 




APPENDIX. 


479 


formation, while that implied in Bikah carries us back to the first separation 
of level land and mountains. 

Bikah is never used like Grai for a narrow valley, hut for a broad plain 
enclosed within ranges; like that of Coele-Syria, which still bears the name of 
Ard-el-Bekaa, “ the land of the plains,” as apparently in the time of the Jews 
it was called Bikath-Aven; Amos i. 5. 

The JBikahs named in the Bible are:— 

1. “The valley of Jericho,” Deut. xxxiv. 3. 

2. “The valley of Mizpeh,” Josh. xi. 8. 

3. “ The valley of Lebanon,” Josh. xi. 17 ; xii. 7. 

4. “ The valley of Megiddo,” 2 Chron. xxxv. 22 ; Zech. xii. 11. 

5. “The plain of Ono,” Neh. vi. 2. 

6. “ The plain of Aven,” Amos i. 5. 

7. “The plain of Dura, in the province of Babylon,” Dan. iii. 1. 

8. “Theplain of Mesopotamia,” Ezek. iii. 22, 23 ; viii. 4 ; xxxvii. 1, 2 ; probably 

the same as 

9. The “plain in the land of Shinar,” Gren. xi. 2. 

Besides the above, the word is used generally in the following passages :— 
Deut. viii. 7 ; xi. 11; Ps. civ. 8; Isai. xii. 18; lxiii. 14 (“ valley”); Isai. xl. 4 
(“plain”). 

In the LXX the word invariably used for Bikah is ntSiov, [all] 


§ 6 . 

MISHOR, ‘level downs’ or table-land: from "tor, just, straightforward; 

hence applied to a country without rock or stone ; like b.<p£\<ua, acpeAys, (N. T. 
a<pe\6rris,) properly a level without stones, <pe\\€i's, and thus in the New Testa¬ 
ment used for plainness or simplicity of character. The transition is seen in 
Ps. xxvii. 11; cxliii. 10; Isai. xl. 4; xlii. 16. 

With the article (wprr, ha-Mishor), the word is, with one possible excep¬ 
tion, used for the upland downs east of Jordan, apparently in contradistinction 
to the rocky soil and more broken ground on the west. The use of the word 
in 1 Kings xx. 23—25, fixes the site of the battle of Aphek as on the east of 
Jordan. The exception noticed above is 2 Chron. xxvi. 10, where it would 
seem that the “ Mishor,” in which Uzziah had his cattle, must have been within 
his own dominion ; just as the Carmel in the same verse must be that in the 
south of Judah, and not the well-known mountain in the tribe of Issachar. 
But the Trans-jordanic situation would be accounted for by his connection with 
the Ammonites (verse 8). 

In its topographical sense the word occurs in Deut. iii. 10; iv. 43; Josh, 
xiii. 9, 16, 17, 21; xx. 8 ; 1 Kings xx. 23, 25; 2 Chron. xxvi. 10; Jer. xxi. 
13; xlviii. 8, 21. 

In the authorised version it is everywhere translated “plain” or “ plains.” 
By the LXX it is either rendered y M urcop —or translated by iredlov ; nr^iv-f] ; y 
yy y 7re5 ivi) or (1 Kings xx. only) Kar e vQv, By Aquila and Symmachus y 6/j.ahy ; 
y elOeia ; koiAos rSiros ; and by Jerome planities ; campestris. See Chap. VIII. 

[all] 


§ 7 - 

SHARON, (fully ] m ") * from level, a word of exactly the same 

meaning as Mishor. It occurs always as a proper name, and excepting once, 
with the article ; Ha-Sharon,—‘ the level ground.’ It is thus invariably 

applied to the plain between the mountains of Ephraim and the sea, bounded 




480 


APPENDIX. 


by Joppa on the south, and Carmel on the north; the great' pasture land on 
the west of the Jordan, as ‘ the Mishor ’ was on the east. See Chapter YI. 


Josh. xii. 19. (In the A. Y. “Lasharon,” the article being 
taken as a part of the word) ...... 

1 Chron. xxvii. 29. ........ 

Isaiah xxxiii. 9. 

xxxv. 2. .... .... 

lxv. 2.. 

Cant. ii. 1.. 


LXX omits. 
iv 'Zapwv. 
6 'Sapoov. 
omits. 

iv tw bpvp.$. 
rod ireSiov. 


The only exception to the use of the article is in 1 Chron. v. 16; its absence 
perhaps indicates that the Sharon, on which the Gadites fed their flocks, was 
‘the Mishor’ of Gilead and Bashan. Indeed it is difficult to see how their 
pasture grounds could be so far from the tribe as Sharon proper must have been. 

[all] 


§ 8 . 

SH’PHELAH, a low flat: from to depress. It has been conjectured 

that this word appears in Spain as Hispolis , Sevilla , Seville; having been 
transferred by the first Phoenician colonists to the level plain of the Guadal¬ 
quivir, in which Seville stands. (Kenrick’s Phoenicia, p. 129.) 

This word is, with one exception, always found with the definite article, 
as the designation of the maritime plain of Philistia: Ha-Shephelah— 
‘ The low country; ’ to which, in Zeph. ii. 5, is applied the more general term 
of Canaan, or lowland. 

The one exception is in Josh. xi. 16 (6), “ the valley of the same,” where it 
seems to be used for Sharon. 


Ha-Shephelah occurs in the following places:— 

English Version. 

Deut. i. 7. . 

Josh ix. 1. . 


x. 40. 

xi. 2,16(a); xi 
1 Kings x. 27. 

1 Chron. xxvii. 28. 

2 Chron. i. 15. . 

ix. 27. . 
xxvi. 10 ; 
Jerem. xvii. 26. . 
xxxii. 44. 
xxxiii. 13. 
Obadiah 19. 

Zech. vii. 7. 

1 Macc. xii. 38. . 


33; Judg.i.9. 


xxviii. 18 


The vale. 

The valleys. 

The vale. 

The valleys. 

The vale. 

The low plains. 
The vale. 

The low plains. 
The low country. 
The plain. 

The valley. 

The vale. 

The plain. 

The plain. 
Sephela. 


Under the name of “ the plain,” — y yrj rj nebivii and rb irebiov. 
is further mentioned in 1 Macc. iii. 40 ; iv. 6; ix. 21. 


Septuagint. 


In these passages 
the word in the LXX 
is rb ireS iov or g 
Tredivi). 


rrjs ^,€(prj\d. 
rrjs 2e</>7jAc£. 
iv rrj HecpriXd. 

71 nebeivi]. 
iv rrj 2e<^Act. 

this district 


§ 9 . 

MID BAB, ‘wilderness:’ from “07, to drive; as in German, Trift, from 

treiben. 

The idea is that of a wide open space, with or without actual pasture ; the 
country of the nomads, 1 as distinguished from that of the agricultural and 


1 Part of the word appears in the name 2 Sam. xvii. 27, was in the nomad pastoral 
Lo-debar, '>7'! a place which we see from country on the east of Jordan. 















APPENDIX. 


481 


settled people. With the article, ha-Midbar, it is generally used for the desert 
of Arabia; but sometimes for the barren tracts which reach into the frontier of 
Palestine, as in the valley of the Jordan (Josh. viii. 15), or in the southern 
mountains of Judaea (Judg. i. 16 ; Glen. xxi. 14). Compare Matt. iii. 1, iv. 1., 
Luke xv. 4. 

In the LXX, as in these passages of the N. Test., Midbar is, in the great 
majority of cases, rendered epypos, or y *pyp-os ; but it is also occasionally translated 
by dyp6s, HuvSpos yy, ireSiov, &c. In the A.Y. it is usually rendered “ wilder¬ 
ness.” In Numb, xxxiii. 15, 16, it occurs as follows: “ And they departed 
from Rephidim and pitched in the wilderness of Sinai; and they removed 
from the desert of Sinai and pitched at Kibroth-hat-taavah.” It is besides 
rendered “ desert” in Exod. iii. 1, v. 3, xxiii. 31; Numb. xx. 1; Deut. xxxii. 
10; 2 Chron. xxvi. 10; Job xxiv. 5; Isaiah xxi. 1; Jer. xxv. 24. In Psalm 
lxxv. 6, it is “south.” 


§ 10. 

ARABAH, 1 desert: ’ from to be dry (the same word as ; 

whence Tnn, Horeb, = the dried-up mountain). Arabah and Midbar both 
describe a similar region, with the difference, that Midbar describes it in 
relation to its use by man,—Arabah, in relation to its physical qualities. 
Accordingly, in the poetical parts of Scripture, Arabah is used almost inter¬ 
changeably with Midbar, in the general sense of any uncultivated wild,— 
frequently as the parallel word to Midbar. (See Isai. xxxv. 1, 6, xli. 19, 
li. 3, &c.) In the historical portions, however, the word, is used with a 
remarkable precision :—(1) With the article, ha-Arabah, The Desert, it denotes 
(with two probable exceptions, to be noticed immediately,) the desert tract 
which extends along the valley of the Jordan from the Dead Sea to the Lake of 
Gennesareth, now called by the Arabs El-Ghor; but (2) when this is not 
intended, and the word is used for other districts, or for parts of the valley 
of the Jordan—as, for instance, the “ plains ” of Moab, or the “ plains” of 
Jericho—there the article is omitted, and the word is in the plural, nw, 
Araboth. The two will be found in juxtaposition in 2 Kings xxv. 4, 5 : “ The 
king fled by the way toward the plain (ha-Arabah, i.e. the Ghor, Yulg. ad cam- 
pestria solitudinis) ; but the Chaldees pursued after him, and overtook him in the 
plains (Araboth) of Jericho,” (in planitie Jericho ). (3). The two exceptions just 
named are Deut. i. 1, and ii. 8, in which (in the former probably, in the latter 
certainly,) the word is applied to the valley between the Dead Sea and the Gulf 
of Akaba; to which, and to which alone, the name is now given by the Arabs 
(Robinson B. R., vol. ii. 599, 600). In this, its widest sense, as the name of 
the whole valley from Hermon to the Red Sea, it corresponds to the ancient use 
of the word Ghor, by Abulfeda,—the two words having had a parallel history ; 
each, in its larger sense, including the whole extent of desert valley ; each, in 
its narrower sense, including only a portion, and that portion the northern. 

Ha-Arabah, the Desert, occurs in the following : 

Dent. i. 1, 7 ; ii. 8; iii. 17; iv. 49. 
xi. 30. .... 

Josh. iii. 16; viii. 14; xi. 16; xii. 1,3. 
xi. 2 ; xii. 8. . 

xv. 6 ( 'rn rvn ). 
xviii. 18. .... 

1 Sam. xxiii. 24; 2 Sam. ii. 29; iv. 7. 

2 Kings xiv. 25 ; xxv. 4. . 

Jeremiah xxxix. 4 ; Iii. 7. . 

Ezek. xlvii. 8. . 


The plain. 

The champaign. 
The plain. 

The plains. 

Beth-arabah. 

Arabah. 

The plain. 

The plain. 

The plain. 

The desert. 


In the great majority 
of these passages, the 
LXX has v Apa/3a or 
71 'Apapa, and in the 
remainder ini Suap.a7s 
or irpbs Sv(rp.wv ; once 
naff kanipav. 




482 


APPENDIX. 


In the plural, and without the article, Araboth, it occurs as follows : 


Numb. xxii. 1 ; xxvi. 3, 63 ; xxxi. 
12 ; xxxiii. 48, 49, 50 ; xxxv. 1 ; 
xxxvi. 13. . 

Deut. xxxiv. 1, 8. 

Josh. iv. 13 ; v. 10. 

xiii. 32. 

2 Sam. xv. 28. 

xvii. 16. .... 
2 Kings xxv. 5. . 

Jerem. xxxix. 5 ; lii. 8. 


The plains of Moab. 
The plains of Moab. 
The plains of Jericho. 
The plains of Moab. 
The plain. 

The plains. 

The plains of Jericho. 
The plains of Jericho. 


In these it is either 
literally 'ApafiuO, or 
else Sv<rpal; once (Jer. 
lii. 8) Tcp irepav ’lepi^co. 


In the poetical books, sometimes with, and sometimes without the article, 
but apparently with the general sense of a desert, the word is found: Job 
xxiv. 5, xxxix. 6; Isai. xxxiii. 9, xxxv. 1, 6, xl. 3, xli. 19, li. 3 ; Jer. ii. 6, 
v. 6, xvii. 6, 1. 12, li. 43 ; Amos vi. 14; Zech. xiv. 10. It is rendered in these 
passages by the LXXeprj^uos; Svcrpat ; yy &wfipos, &tt eipos, and &P<xtos ; e\os and ayp6$. 
In the English version, “wilderness,” “desert,” or “plain,” apparently 
indiscriminately. [all] 


§ ii. 


J*SHIMON, ‘ waste: ’ from cur, to be laid waste; with the article, 

apparently for the desert tract in the south of Palestine, on both sides of the 
Dead Sea, (see Num. xxi. 20; xxiii. 28; 1 Sam. xxiii. 19, 24; xxvi. 1, 3). 
In all these cases the English version has “ Jeshimon.” 1 Beth-Jesimoth, “ the 
house of the wastes,” Num. xxxiii. 49, is in the same district. 

Without the article, it occurs in the following passages of poetry, generally 
with the meaning of the Wilderness of the Wanderings. 


Deut. xxxii. 10 ; Ps. lxviii. 7. 

Ps. lxxviii. 40 ; cvi. 14 ; Isa. xliii. 19, 20. 

Ps. cvii. 4. . 

LXX generally &vvdpos —sometimes ipypos. 


“wilderness.” 

‘ ‘ desert.” 
“solitary.” 

[all] 


§ 12 . 

CICCAB, "ISS, 1 roundfrom to, to move in a circle ; thus kvk\os, circus , 
circle. In accordance with its origin, this word is used in the Bible in three 
senses, each involving the idea of circularity : (1) a coin, or piece of money— 
a talent,—as Exod. xxv. 39, 2 Kings v. 22, 23, 1 Chron. xxii. 2; (2) a cake, 
or loaf of bread,—Exod. xxix. 23, 1 Sam. x. 3, 1 Chron. xvi. 3 ; and (3) 
topographically, mostly with the article, Ha-Ciccar, for (a) the floor of the valley 
through which the Jordan runs; but more especially for (5) the oasis which 
formerly existed in the lower part of the river, “well watered everywhere 
... as the garden of the Lord and the land of Egypt,” in which “the cities 
of the round ” stood before their destruction. See Chapter VII. p. 281. 

In the former sense (a), it appears to be used in 

2 Sam. xviii. 23 2 . . . . ryv oSbv t)]v tov Ke^dp. 

1 Kings vii. 46 . . . . iv rep tt tpiohccp tov ’I opddvov. 

2 Chron. iv. 17 . . . . . „ nreptx&pq) » 

Nehem. iii. 22.e/c Xex«P- 

Nehem. xii. 28 .... rrjs irepixc&pov. 


1 The two expressions, “which looketh 2 Ewald (2nd edit.) vol. iii. 237, has an 
toward,” and “ which is before,” in the ingenious suggestion of a different meaning, 
above passages are translations of the same See Chapter VIII. 

Hebrew words '35-^2 = in face of. 










APPENDIX. 


In the latter and narrower sense (6), it occurs in 


Gen. xiii. 10, 11 (without the article). 

Gen. xiii. 12 

Gen. xix. 17, 25, 28 . 

Gen. xix. 29 ... 

Deut. xxxiv. 3 


rrjv treplxcopou. 


rr)S irepioiKov. 
to 7r eplxajpa. 


In the English version it is constantly rendered “ plain.” 


483 


[all] 


$ 13 . 

G LILOTH, niVbs, ‘ circles: ’ from tta, to roll. 

Of the five times in which this word occurs in Scripture, two are in the 
general sense of coast or border: 

Josh. xiii. 2. . “ All the borders of the Philistines.” . Spia. 

Joeliii. 4. . . “ All the coasts of Palestine.” . . TaAiAaia aAAo<f>vAuv. 

and three specially relate to the course of the Jordan 

Josh. xxii. 10, 11. . “ The borders of Jordan.” . . TaAaoS rod ’I opdauov 

(Symm. r 6pia). 

Ezek. xlvii. 8. 1 . . “The east country.'' . . els tV yaAiAalav. 

It has been pointed out in Chap. YII. p. 278 note, that this word is analo¬ 
gous to the Scotch term “ links,” which has both the meanings of Geliloth, being 
used of the snake-like windings of a stream, as well as with the derived mean¬ 
ing of a coast or shore. Thus Geliloth is distinguished from Ciccar, which will 
rather mean the circle of vegetation or dwellings, gathered round the bends 
and reaches of the river. 

A place named Geliloth is mentioned in Josh, xviii. 17, which, as far as the 
imperfect indications of the text allow, seems to be close to the Arabah, or 
Jordan valley. 

The word rendered in the Old Testament Galilee,—probably to keep up the 
correspondence with the New Testament,—is Vba, Galil, and D'iarr % the 
‘ district of the Gentiles,’ or heathen ; probably from the number of Canaanites 
who remained unexpelled from the cities of that part of the country (see 
Judg. i. 27—33). It seems, from 1 Kings ix. 11, to have] consisted of twenty 
cities, the chief of which was the sacred city, Kedesh in Galilee, or Kedesh- 
Naphtali. [all] 


§ 14 . 

CARAMEL, ‘ a park 2 from ona, to be noble (whether of man or vegetable); 

whence Cerem, a vine, 3 and Carmel, a “fruitful field” or well wooded country. 
Its meaning, as distinguished from a ‘wilderness’ (Midbar, § 9), and a ‘forest’ 
(Jaar, § 71), is fixed by 

Isai. xxix. 17 ; xxxii. 15, 16. . . . “ fruitful field.” 

Jer. ii. 6, 7. . . . . • • “ plentiful country.” 


1 ‘ ‘ These waters issue out toward the 2 Gesenius, (Jesaia), Gartenwald ; Baum- 

eastern ‘circles’ [of the Jordan], and go down garten. 

into the ‘Arabah,’ and go into the ‘Dead’ 3 Comp. Abel -ceramim, “the meadow of 
Sea.” the vineyards,” Judges xi. 33. 


i i 2 



484 


APPENDIX. 


With the same general signification it is also used in 


2 Kings xix. 23 ; Isai. xxxvii. 24 
Isai. x. 8. 
xvi. 10. 

Jer. iv. 26. ... 

xlviii. 33. 


“Carmel.” 
“fruitful field.” 
“ plentiful field.” 
“fruitful place.” 
“ plentiful field.” 


By the LXX the word is rendered ol dpvfwl, apnex^u, iraXady, hut is oftenest 
given as Kappn^ov. 

As a proper name (almost invariably with the definite article ha-Carmel) 
the word belongs to two places. 


1. The well-known mountain of the name, the present aspect of which is 
the best evidence of the meaning of “Carmel,” as a mixture of cultivated 
ground, and woodland. It occurs as follows:— 

Josh. xii. 22; xix. 26. 1 Kings xviii. 19, 20, 42. 2 Kings ii. 25; iv. 25. Isai. 
xxxiii. 9; xxxv. 2. Jer. xlvi. 18 ; 1. 19. Cant. vii. 5 ; Amos i. 2 ; ix. 3. Micah 
vii. 14 ; Nahum i. 4 ; Judith i. 8. 


2. The Carmel in the “ wilderness of Paran; ”—or, as the LXX read it , 1 of 
Maon,’—in the south of Judah, where the possessions of Nabal were, and the 
name of which continued to designate David’s favourite wife, “Abigail the 
Carmelitess,” the “wife of Nabal the Carmelite.” Inferior as the vegetation 
of the southern Carmel is to that of its northern namesake, it must yet have 
been a ‘park’ to those who “went up” to it (1 Sam. xxv. 5) from the desert 
at its feet. (See Chap. I. part ii. pp. 100,101.) 

See Josh. xv. 55 ; 1 Sam. xv. 12 ; xxv. 2, 5, 7, 40 ; 2 Chron. xxvi. 10. [all] 


§ 15 . 

SADEH, nT^, ‘field : ’ probably from rn®, to smooth ; or level with a harrow; 
as arvum, from arare. Hence, although like the English word field it has 
several applications (“ the beasts of the field ; ” “in the open fields; ” “ wild,” 
literally, ‘ of the field,’) it is most commonly used for cultivated land, as distin¬ 
guished from town, desert, or garden. This is clear from the following 
passages amongst many: Gen. xli. 48, xlvii. 20, 24; Lev. xix. 9, 19; Numb, 
xvi. 14, xx. 17 ; Ruth ii. 2, 3, &c.; 2 Sam. xxiii. 11, and 1 Chron. xi. 13 (in 
both “ground”); Job xxiv. 6; Jerem. xxvi. 18: Micah iii. 12; Prov. 
xxiv. 30. A further example of this use of the word is seen in Gen. xxxiii. 19, 
xxxiv. 5, 7, 28, xxxvii. 7—15, where it is employed to designate the piece 
of cultivated land lying “before the city” of Shechem, the acquisition of 
which marked the transition of Jacob from the Bedouin shepherd into the 
agricultural settler (Chap. Y. pp. 232, 244). And it is thus used in 2 Kings, 
viii. 3, 5 (“land”) for the property of the Shunamite, which it is evident 
from iv. 18, was farm-land. 

The expression itfio rnirn, or 'o v to, “the field, or fields, of Moab,” 
is used in Gen. xxxvi. 35, and 1 Chron. i. 46 ; Numb. xxi. 20; Ruth i. 1, 2, 
6, 22, ii. 6, iv. 3; 1 Chron. viii. 8 ; probably for the pasture and corn-fields on 
the uplands, as distinguished from Araboth, “ the plains of Moab,” or deserts, 
meaning the dry sunken region in the valley of the Jordan (Chap. VII., 
p. 292). See also 

“ Country of the Amalekites,” Gen. xiv. 7, 

“ Country of Edom,” Gen. xxxii. 3, “ field of Edom,” Judges v. 4. 

“ Field of Zophim,” Numbers xxiii. 14. 

“Country of the Philistines,” 1 Sam. xxvii. 5, 7, 11. (Compare the cultivation 
betokened in the “corn, and vineyards, and olives” of Judges xv. 5.) 






APPENDIX. 


485 


“ Cowvtry of Syria,” Hosea xii. 12. (Compare Glen. xxxi. 4.) 

“ Field of Zoan,” Psalm lxxviii. 12, 43. 

“ Country of the inheritance of Israel,” Judges xx. 6. 

If the above explanation of the word be the correct one, the “vale of 
Siddim,” (D’Ticrr por>), Gen. xiv. 3, 8, is ‘ the valley of well cultivated fields’ 
in the oasis of the five cities. (See, however, a different meaning in Gesenius, 
p. 1321). LXX 7] (papayi- 7] a.XvK'fi. Aquila, 7] K0i\as twv neparedivay. Theod. and 
Symm., rS>v &\<ruv. Jerome, Vallis Silvestris. 

In Ruth iy. 3, the word occurs twice, each time differently rendered 
“Naomi that is come out of the country of Moab, selleth a parcel of land , 
which was,” &c. 

By the LXX Sadeh is oftenest rendered a yp6s ; but also nediov and yrj, as 
well as yecopyiov, Spvjuds, X^P T0S > KTrjfxa, &c. [all] 


§ 16 . 

SHEDEMOTH, ni&lttf, ‘ fields from tnti to enclose. “ The fields of Gomorrah,” 
Deut. xxxii. 32 : of Kidron, 2 Kings xxiii. 4 ; Jer. xxxi. 40; of Heshbon, Isa. 
xvi. 8 ; see also Hab. iii. 17. From its connection with the vine and olives in 
the first and two last of these passages, Shedemoth would seem to be used for 
highly cultivated ground. LXX ra n-eS/a, and literally <radri(iu>9. [all] 


§ 17 . 

ABEL, 'TIN, 1 a meadow : ’ from “ to be wet, like moist grass: ” hence applied 
to places deriving their names from adjacent trees or water; as 

1. Abel, Abel-betb-maachah, or Abel-maim, (‘the meadow of waters,’) 2 Sam. xx. 

14, 15, 18; 1 Kings xv. 20 ; 2 Kings xv. 29 ; 2 Chron. xvi. 4. 

2. Abel-meholah, (‘the meadow of dancing,’) Jud. vii. 22 ; 1 Kings iv. 12 ; xix. 16. 

3. “ The plain of the vineyards, ” (Abel-ceramim,) Jud. xi. 33. 

4. Abel-ha-Shittim, (‘the meadow of the acacias,’) Numb, xxxiii. 49. 

None of these sites have been precisely identified, but they must have all 
more or less been under the circumstances involved in the derivation. Thus 
Abel-maim must have been in the marshy valley of the Lake of Merom: (see 
Chap. XI. p. 388). Abel-meholah—being named with Zartan, or Zererath, 
and Bethshean—must have been close to the Jordan: and Abel-shittim was 
“by Jordan,” and as its name shows, under the shade of acacia groves. 
Abel-mizraim, according to the explanation in the text, (Gen. 1. 11,) has its 
name from biN ‘ mourning ’—and was so called from the weeping of the 
Egyptians. “The great [stone of] Abel” (it will be perceived that “stone 
of” is supplied by the translators) in 1 Sam. vi. 18, appears by comparison 
with verse 15, and with the Targum, and the LXX, end rod kiOou rod p.eyd\ov } to 
be a corruption for Eben, a stone (compare vii. 12.) Our translators, as 
was their frequent custom, here followed the Vulgate, which has ad abel 
magnum. 

For Abil or Abila, the capital of Abilene, see Chap. XII., p. 405. [all] 

$ 18 . 

The word translated in Gen. xli. 2, 18, “meadow,” is 

ACHU, a word of Egyptian derivation (see Gesenius, p. 67, s. voce ) pro¬ 

bably signifying the rushes or flags which grew in the marshy ground along 




486 


APPENDIX. 


the Nile. In the LXX it is literally rendered rf *Xh Mu. an(i S X 11 ^; 
c\os. It is only met with once again, in Job. viii. II, 1 where the LXX 
has it PoiTofxov, Auth. Yers. “hag.” Philo in his version of Gen. xli. has 

-7T apa ras bxO&s. 


§ 19 . 

MAAREH, TTJSO, ‘ an open field,’ from rr», to be bare: occurs only in Judg. xx. 
33, the ‘ ‘ meadows of Gibeah ” (Geba). The word has, however, been considered 
by some interpreters as rmo, ‘ the cave of G.;’ by others, as arwo, ‘from the 
west of G.’ And SO the LXX Alex. airb Suapuv rrjs yct&aa. 

As a proper name, it is found in Maarath, a town of Judah; Josh. xv. 59. 


§ 20 . 


CHELKAH, nfjbn, ‘ a plot of ground; ’ strictly, a smooth piece (comp. Gen. 
xxvii. 16, “ smooth”): from pfrr, to he smooth. It is used with Sadeh, (§ 16) in 


Gen. xxxiii. 19 
Josh. xxiv. 32 
Ruth ii. 3 . 

iv. 3 

2 Sam. xxiii. 11, 12 2 
2 Kings ix. 25 
1 Chron. xi. 13 

and without it in : 

2 Sam. xiv. 30, 31 
2 Kings iii. 19, 25 
ix. 21 
26 , 
1 Chr. xi. 14 


“parcel of a field.” 

“ parcel of ground.” 

“ part of the field.” 

“parcel of land.” 

(a) “piece of ground,” (6) “ground” 
“portion of the field.” 

“parcel of ground.” 


. field. 

. piece of land. 
. portion. 

. a plat. 

. parcel. 


The word is frequently used in the poetical books, as is also the kindred 
pbn, chelek, mostly rendered “portion,” L XX , pepis. 

As a proper name, Chelkah is found in Chelkath hat-tzurim , 2 Sam. ii. 16. 
“The mount Chalak,” (margin, ‘the smooth mountain,’) occurs Josh. xi. 17; 
xii. 7. 


§ 21 . 

NAPHATH, nS3, a word used only in connexion with Dor, the ancient Phoeni¬ 
cian city on the maritime plain on the south of Carmel. (See Chap. YI.) It is 
translated by Symmachus 'rj irapa\la A up, ‘ the sea coast of Dor’—a signification 
which seems more correct than Gesenius’ explanation of it ( Thesaurus , p. 866) 
as “ promontory ” or “high tract,” since Dor (the modern Tantura) is dis- 


1 The use of this word and of that for 
“rush” (*rai, papyrus nilotica; comp. Exod. 
ii. 3, &c.) in this passage of Job, is one of 
several proofs that the author of that book 
was acquainted with Egypt. 


2 There is here a curious confusion in the 
Auth. Version. “ The Philistines were ga¬ 
thered together in a troop, where was a piece 
(chelkah) of ground (sadeh) full of lentiles 

.but he stood in the midst of the 

ground (chelkah) and defended it.” 









APPENDIX. 


487 


tinctly apart from Carmel and the hilly country on its southern flanks. The 
word only occurs three times: in 

Joshua xi. 2 . “ borders of Dor ” . (peveabboop, Alex. va<pe65wp. 

,, xii. 23 . 11 coast of Dor” . <pevea\8top, Alex. i/a<pe58a>p. 

lKingsiy.il . “ region of Dor ” . vecpOaScbp. 1 

In Joshua xvii. 11,—with a different pointing, nm, the word is applied to 
the whole district of the plains at the foot of Carmel, both on its north and 
south sides—•“ the inhabitants of En-Dor 2 and her towns, and the inhabitants 
of Taanach and her towns, and the inhabitants of Megiddo and her towns— 
three countries ,” or, more strictly, ‘ the triple district’ (as Decapolis). 

From this, Naphath would appear to be a local word applied to the plains 
at the foot of Carmel, much as Ciccar (§ 12) and Geliloth (§ 13) were to the 
Jordan valley. [all] 


§ 22 . 

CHEBEL, bjq, land measured out, or allotted, by a rope, tan — a tract or 
‘ district.’* The district of Argob in Bashan, is uniformly distinguished by the 
use of this word, rendered in the A. Y. “ region” and “ country.” See Deut. 
iii. 4, 13, 14, and 1 Kings iv. 13. Chebel is used in a general topographical 
sense in Josh. xvii. 5, 14; xix. 9, (all “portion”); and Josh. xix. 29 ; Zeph. 
ii. 5, 6, 7, (all “coast”). The LXX seem to have rendered it indifferently 
irepix^pa, r) tt eplx^pos, and, retaining its original meaning, oxotW/xa. Symm. 
irepi/xeTpov. Jerome : regio ; funiculus. 


II.—MOUNTAINS AND RISING GROUND. 

§ 23 . 

HAR, tan, and HOR, tan or tain (compare the Greek opos and the Slavonic goru ), a 
‘ mountain,’ as distinguished from Gibeah, a low mountain or hill. 

Har is employed both for single mountains—as Sinai, Gerizim, Zion, or 
Olivet—and for ranges, as Lebanon. It is also applied to a mountainous 
country or district, as in Josh. xi. 16, where “the mountain of Israel” is 
the highland of Palestine, as opposed to the “valley and the plain:” and in 
Josh. xi. 21, xx. 7, where “the mountains of Judah” (incorrectly rendered 
plural) is the same as “the hill country” (vr) in xxi. 11. Similarly, Mount 
Ephraim (Hor Ephraim) is the mountainous district occupied by that tribe, which 
is evident from the fact that the Mount Gaash (Josh. xxiv. 30), Mount 
Zemaraim (2 Chron. xiii. 4), the hill of Phinehas (Josh. xxiv. 33), and the towns 
of Shechem, Shamir (Judges x. 1), Timnath-Serach (Josh. xix. 50), besides 
other cities (2 Chron. xv. 8), were all situated upon it. 

Compare also, “the mountain of the Amorites,” which apparently is the 
elevated country east of the Dead Sed and Jordan (Deut. i. 7, 19, 20)—and 
“Mount Naphtali,” (Josh. xx. 7.) 

The name of Mount Hor firm nb, i. e. the mountain kut Qoxt\v) is borne 
(1) by that close to Petra, on which Aaron died (LXX Cip t b 6pos) ; and 


1 All plainly mere corruptions of a literal appear that En-Dor in the above passage is pro¬ 
rendering of the original. bably an interpolation for Dor. The LXX in 

2 By comparison with the parallel list of Josh. xvii. 11, have rous KaroiKowTas Awp. 
Manasseh’s cities in Judges i. 27, it would 





488 


APPENDIX. 


(2) by a member of the Lebanon range, named in Num. xxxiv. 7, 8, as one of 
the marks of the northern boundary of Palestine (LXX rb 6pos rb 6pos, Yulg. 
ad montem altissimum ), which is explained in the Talmud (Gittin viii.) to be 
the mountain Amana, Cant. iv. 8. (See Fuerst’s HandW.Buch, p. 336.) 

The various mountains or districts to which the word Har is applied in 
the Old Testament are as follows :— 

Abarim, Amana (Cant. iv. 8); Ararat: Baalah; Baal-Hermon (Judg. iii. 3; 
compare Josh. xiii. 5); Bethel; Bether (Cant. ii. 17); Carmel; Ebal; Emek 
(Josh. xiii. 19), translated “ the mount of the valley,” after the Yulgate monte 
convallis, but probably Emek 1 (valley) was its name; LXX eV rep bpei ’E van, 2 
Zunz, auf dem Thalberg ); Ephron (Josh. xv. 9); Gaash; Gerizim; Gilboa; 
Gilead; Halak (the smooth mountain, Josh. xi. 17); Heres (Judg. i. 35); 
Hermon; Hor (2); Horeb; Jearim (Josh. xv. 10); Olivet, or of Olives (Zech. 
xiv. 4; in 2 Sam, xv. 30, the expression is, David went up “by the ascent 
(maaleh) of ‘the Olives,’” not “of Mount Olivet”); Mizar 3 (Ps. xlii. 6); 
Moriah ; Nebo; Paran (Deut. xxxiii. 2); Perazim (Isai. xxviii. 21); Samaria 
(1 Kings xvi. 24, “the hill Samaria,” accurately ‘the mountain Shomeron’); 
Seir; Sephar ("®d Gen. x. 30); Sinai; Sion, Sirion, or Shenir (all names for 
Hermon, Deut. iii. 9; iv. 48); Shapher ("ipti Numb, xxxiii. 23); Tabor; 
Zalmon (Jud. ix. 48); Zemaraim (2 Chron. xiii. 4); Zion. 

^ There are also, the mountain of theAmorites; of the Amalekites (Judg. 
xii. 15); of Ephraim; of Esau; of Israel; of Judah; of Naphtali; and of 
Bashan (Ps. lxviii. 15). 

Har is rendered in the English version by “mountain,” “mount,” and 
“ hill; ” in the LXX, with a few exceptions, opos and bpeirr/. 

Mention has been made of the frequent occurrence throughout the 
Scriptures of personification of the great features of the country. 

The following are, it is believed, all the words used with this object in 
relation to mountains or hills:— 

(а) Head, ttfhH, Posh. Gen. viii. 5 ; Exod. xix. 20; Deut. xxxiv. 1 ; 1 Kings 

xviii. 42 ; (E.Y. top). Of a hill (gibeah), Exod. xvii. 9, 10. 

(б) Ears, l"Vb|N, Az’noth. Aznoth-Tabor, Josh. xix. 34; possibly in allusion to 

some projection on the top of the mountain. 

(c) Shoulder, Cataph. Deut. xxxiii. 12; Josh. xv. 8, and xviii. 16 

(“side”) ; all referring to the hills on which Jerusalem is placed. (See 
Chapter IV., p. 195.) Josh. xv. 10, “the side of Mount Jearim.” 

(d) Side, 1^, Tzad. (See the word for the side of a man in 2 Sam. ii. 16, Ezek. 

iv. 4. &c.) Used in reference to a mountain ini Sam. xxiii. 26, 2 Sam. xiii. 34. 

(e) Loins or Flanks, Hbp3, Cis’loth. Cisloth-Tabor, Josh. xix. 12 ; and occurs 

also in the name of a village, probably situated on this part of the mountain, 
Ha-Cesulloth, nibpprr, i.e. the ‘loins.’ Josh. xix. 18. 

(/) Rib, nbp, Tzelah. Only used once, in speaking of the Mount of Olives, 2 Sam. 
xvi. 13, and there translated “side,” e/c vXtvpas rod opovs. 

(g) Back, Sh’cem. Probably the root of the name of the town Shechem, 

which may be derived from its situation, as it were on the back of 
Gerizim. 


1 Compare the same collocation in the name 
of the well-known mountain Lang -dale Pikes, 
in Cumberland. 

2 Compare the same reading by the LXX 

in Jer. xlvii. 5, xlix. 4. See § 1. 


3 The use of the word Har shows that the 
Prayer-Book version “the little hill of 
Hermon” is erroneous: Mizar is ‘small,’ 
perhaps by comparison with the main Peak of 
Hermon, though a large mountain in itself. 



APPENDIX. 


489 


(h) Elbow, Ammali. The same word as that for cubit. It occurs in 

2 Sam. ii. 24, as the name of a hill near Gibeon. LXX, ecos tov fiovvov ’A fi/xav. 

(i) Thigh, Jar’cah. (See the word for the thigh of a man in Jud. iii. 

16, 21.) Of Mount Ephraim, Judges xix. 1, 18 : of Lebanon, 2 Kings xix. 
23 ; Isai. xxxvii. 24. Used also for the “sides” of a cave, 1 Sam. xxiv. 3. 

{"h .) The word translated ‘‘ covert ” in 1 Sam. xxv. 20 (LXX, iv ckItt) tov opovs ) is 
"'C l s?> Sether : from "inD, to hide (the same root as that from which Mistor, 
§ 90, is derived), and probably refers to the shrubbery or thicket through 
which Abigail’s path lay. In this passage “ hill” should be ‘ mountain.’ 


§ 24 . 

PISGAH, or more strictly HA-PISGAH, rClpQrT, ‘ the height: ’ a range of hills 
on the east of Jordan opposite Jericho, remarkable as having been the scene of 
Moses view of the Promised Land: Nebo, from which Moses looked, was 
(Deut. xxxiv. 1 *) a peak of the range. Pisgah itself had, at least in places 
(see Numb, xxiii. 14), a flat surface on its top, and even cultivated land—“the 
Jield of Zophim,” (comp. Sadeh, § 15). 2 In the time of Eusebius this district on 
the east of the Jordan retained the name of <pa.ay<!> (Onom. s. v. ’a& apei/i). 

Ha-Pisgah occurs as follows: Numb. xxi. 20; xxiii. 14; Deut. iii. 27; 
xxxiv. 1. By the LXX it is rendered <5 \e\a£evp.4vos } ‘the quarried,’ in every 
case hut the last: in that, <pa.<ryd. The Sam. Yers. has uniformly nn’DD specula 
a watch-tower. 

For Ashdoth-Pisgah, the “roots” or “springs” of Pisgah, see § 48. [all] 


§ 25 . 

GIB*AH, TOp}, ‘a hill,’ (as distinguished from Har, a mountain): from isa, 
a hump, or curve; (compare the Latin gibbus , and German gipfel.) The distinc¬ 
tion is not always so strictly observed, but that of two eminences, not far from 
each other, the lower may not be called ‘ hor 5 and the higher ‘ gibeah ’: e. g. 
Gibeon (El Jib), and Gibeah. (Jeba), are both higher than the Hor or Mount of 
Olives. But the word Gibeah is never applied to a high or extended mountain 
like Lebanon or Sinai, while from its root it is particularly applicable to the 
humped or rounded hills of Palestine. On the distinction between Hor 
and Gibeah depends an important argument in deciding the claims of Mount 
Serbal and Gebel Mousa to be the Sinai of the Exodus : see Chap. I. p. 41. 

In modern Arabic, the word Gebel is applied to all eminences; as, for 
example, to the rock of Tarik,—Gebel-tarik, or Gibraltar. 

There were several places of this name in Palestine. 

1. “Gibeah of Benjamin,” Judg. xix. 14 ; 1 Sam. xiii. 2, 15 ; or—from Saul’s residence 
there—“of Saul,” 1 Sam. xi. 4; xv. 34 ; 2 Sam. xxi. 6 ; Isai. x. 29. Apparently the 
first mention of it is in the list of the cities of Benjamin in Josh, xviii. 28, where it is 
called Gibeath ; and it occurs simply as Gibeah in Judg. xix. 12 ; 1 Sam. x. 26, and 
many other places. 

Note.—Gibeah, in 2 Sam. vi. 3, 4, has the article, and should be rendered, as indeed 
it is in 1 Sam. vii. 1, ‘the Hill,’ that is, a hill close to Kirjath-jearim. 

2. Gibeah, a city in the mountains of Judah, Josh. xv. 57, only. 

3. Geba, or Gaba ; a city of Benjamin, Josh. xviii. 24 ; 1 Sam. xiii. 3 ; 2 Kings xxiii. 8. 

A distinct place from Gibeah (1), though evidently (Isai. x. 29) in close proximity to 
it. That the two names were interchangeable is apparent from the fact that in 
Judg. xx. 10, and in 1 Sam. xiii. 16, Gibeah of Benjamin is, in the Hebrew, “Geba 


1 Accurately, ‘ the Mount Nebo, head of the Pisgah.’ 


8 See Ritter, Syrien, p. 1192. 




490 


APPENDIX. 


of B.” In addition there is some confusion in the A. V. ‘ Gieba ’ being rendered 
“ Gibeah” in both the above instances, as well as in Judg. xx. 33, and 1 Sam. 
xiv. 5. 

4. Gibeon, the important city in Benjamin. Josh. ix. 3 ; 1 Kings iii. 4, 5, &c. &c. From 
1 Chron. xiv. 16 (compared with 2 Sam. v. 25, and 2 Kings xxiii. 8), Gibeon would 
seem to be used interchangeably with Geba for the northern boundary of the kingdom 
of Judah. 

Mention is also made of 

“ Gibeah ha-araloth,” ‘the hill of the foreskins,’ fiovvbs 

rwv a.Kpufivo'Tiwt' ...... Josh. v. 3. 

“The hill of Phinehas in Mount Ephraim:” yafiaap 

(pivees .Josh. xxiv. 33. 

“Hill of Moreh dirb yafiaadaficopai . . . Jud. vii. 1. 

“ Hill of Hachilah” (darkness) : r<p fiovvtp tov ’ExeAa . 1 Sam. xxiii. 19 ; xxvi. 1. 

“ Hill of Ammah eus tov fiovvov ’A fj.fj.dv . . 2 Sam. ii. 24. 

“HillGareb:” eus fSovvwv Taphfi . . . . Jer. xxxi. 39. 

In Isai. xxxi. 4, and Ezek. xxxiv. 26, gibeah is used for the hill of Zion. 
In the LXX it is almost constantly rendered frowis, and in the E.Y. without 
an exception, “ hill.” 


§ 26 . 

OPHEL, ‘ swelling mound: ’ from tes, to swell; and hence the plural ophelim 

is used for ‘ tumours,’ in Deut. xxviii. 27; 1 Sam. v. 6, &c. (Compare the 
Latin tumulus from tumeo). In 2 Kings y. 24, it is applied to the residence of 
Elisha, near Jericho, and translated “ tower,” LXX, rb cKOTeivdv, Yulg. 
vesperi. Elsewhere, with the doubtful exceptions of Isai. xxxii. 14, and 
Micah iv. 8,—and in every case with the definite article ha-Ophel, the mound— 
it is applied to an eminence on the south-east (comp. Neh. iii. 26.) of the 
Temple, on the old site of Solomon’s Palace, (see 2 Chron. xxvii. 3 ; xxxiii. 14 ; 
Neh. iii. 26, 27; xi. 21). Hence, in later times, the word appears to have 
acquired the meaning of ‘ fort,’ as in (oybor), “bulwark of the people,” 

the name applied to St. James the Just by Hegesippus (Eus. H. E. II. 23). 


$ 27. 

SH^FI, 'DtP, ‘ a bare place on a hill,’ from nctf, to scrape, or shave. The word 

occurs in Num. xxiii. 3, “to an high place;” LXX, i-rropevOr) evde7av; 
and also in the following passages:—Isai. xli. 18; xlix. 9; Jer. iii. 2, 21 ; 
iv. 11; vii. 29 ; xii. 12 ; xiv. 6 ; in each of which it is rendered “ high place.” 

[all.] 


§ 28. 

TZUR, “fiS, or Chald. TUR, ‘ a rock : ’ from "ws, to bind together (see the 
word employed, and so translated, in Deut. xv. 25, 2 Kings v. 23.) Thus the 
leading idea of the word is strength and solidity; and it is so used in 
many well known passages as one of the titles of Jehovah: Psalm xxxi. 2, 
lxii. 6, &c. It is accordingly applied to rocks, irrespective of their height, 
.height being only in one or two cases (as Numb, xxiii. 9, Psalm lxi. 2) asso¬ 
ciated with the word. Thus, Tyre or Tzur—which still retains its name_ 

is built not on a cliff, but on a reef of rock (see Chap. YI. p. 265). 




APPENDIX. 


491 


The particular ‘ rocks ’ named in the Bible, are “ the rock in Horeb,” Exod. 
xvii. 6; and “ the rock Oreb,” the scene of the death of the Midianitish chief 
of the same name. Jud. vii. 25; Is. x. 26. 

The word is also found in Helkath-hat- tzurim, ‘ the smooth piece of the 
strong,’ 2 Sam. ii. 16; and in Beth-tzur, Josh. xv. 58. 

Tzur is most commonly rendered by the LXX irerpa, and occasionally opos — 
in the Psalms and poetical Books, where God is called a Bock, it is according 
to the usual custom of the LXX ©ech, but also f$oi)Q6s, ayios, <pv\a£, ktI(tt7)s, &c. 

In connection with Tzur is found, 

(a) NIKOLAI! n'npD, ‘ a hole: ’ from TEJ, to dig or bore, which only occurs 
twice, Exod. xxxiii. 22; Isa. ii. 21; in the latter in contrast to Seiph and 
Sela—“to go into the ‘holes’ of the ‘rocks,’ and into the ‘clefts’ of the 
‘ cliffs.’ ” 


§ 29 . 

SELA, V'PP, ‘ a cliff: ’ from to be lifted up : hence here the leading idea is that 
of height, and the allusions are continually to “ the top of the cliff,” as, for 
instance, Jud. xy. 8; 2 Kings xiy. 7 ; Isa. ii. 21, &c. 

The ‘ cliffs ’ named in the Bible are :— 

Etam ....... Judges xy. 8, 11 . rj nerpa ’Ht ap.. 

Rimmon ....... Judges xx. 45 . 7? irerpa rou 'P. 

Sela-ha-machlekoth, ‘The cliff of the escapes’ 1 Sam. xxiii. 28 . Trerparj nepiaOeiaa. 

Sela is specially used for the cliff at Kadesh, from which Moses brought 
water, as Tzur is for that struck in Exod. xvii. a distinction which may be of 
importance in determining the scenes of these two events: Numb. xx. 8, 10, 
11; Neh. ix. 15; Psalm lxxyiii. 16. (chap. I. p. 96.) 

With the article, ha-Sela, the cliff, it is the capital of the Edomites, after¬ 
wards called by the equivalent name Petra. 

See 2 Kings xiy. 7 . 

2 Chron. xxv. 12 

Also probably Judges i. 36 

Without article j Q^d^* * 

Like Tzur, and apparently without any distinction, Sela is used in the poetical 
books as an epithet of Jehovah; see Ps. xviii. 2, xlii. 9. In poetry it is the 
parallel word to Tzur; Ps. lxxviii. 15, 16, xxxi. 2, 3; Isai. a ii. 21. The 
word is in the LXX, almost always rendered Trerpa. The only exception worth 
notice is KprjpvSs, in 2 Chron. xxv. 12. 

In exclusive connexion with Sela several words are found. These are :— 

(a.) CHAGAYIM, ‘ depths’ or ‘ chasms: ’ from run, to penetrate deeply. This 

word only occurs three times, in the poetical books; viz. Cant. ii. 14, Jer. 
xlix. 16, andObad. 3. It is always used with sela, ‘cliff;’ and the two last 
passages referring to the cliffs of Petra fix its meaning with accuracy. 

(5.) S'lPH, ‘ cleft: ’ from FpD, to split. It occurs in Jud. xv. 8, 11; Isa. ii. 

21 ; lvii. 5. 

(c.) TZ^CHIACH, ITTO, a place exposed to the sun, and thence the dried-up 
surface at the top of a cliff. It occurs, Neh. iv. 13 (“ higher places”), Ezek. 
xxiv. 7, 8; xxvi. 4, 14. 


'77 nerpa. 

rb &npov tov Kpri/JLVov. 
T7)s 7 rerpas. 

7T6 rpa. 

rwv irerpow. 




492 


APPENDIX. 


(c?.) N^KIK, |T|?D, ‘ a cranny.’ It occurs, Isai. vii. 19; Jer. xiii. 4, xvi. 16. 

(e.) SHEN, )t£?, ‘ a crag,’ literally a tooth : Job xxxix. 28, “ the crag of the ‘ cliff.’ ’’ 
It occurs also in 1 Sam. xiv. 4, 5. which is accurately, “ a crag of the cliff was on 
one side, and a crag of the cliff on the other side .... the one crag was situate 
northward . . . and the other southward.” The place Shen, named only in 
1 Sam. vii. 12, was probably some conspicuous pointed rock. It is accurately 
ha-Shen ‘ the crag; ’—with the definite article: LXX, rrjs naXaias. 1 


§ 30 . 

CEPHIM, O^Dp. The word only occurs twice; viz. in Job xxx. 6, and Jer. iv. 
29, “ rocksand it is perhaps impossible to fix the distinction between it and 
Tzur, or Sela; but it is interesting as being the word from which the Syriac 
name Cephas (John i. 42) was derived. Caipha, the modern town under Carmel, 
is probably the same word; and thus corresponds to Tzur or Tyre. 


§ 31 . 

MIS’GAB, ‘ refuge,’ on a high rock: from to be high. Only used in the 

poetical books of Scripture,—as for example 2 Sam. xxii. 3; Psalm xviii. 2; 
Isai. xxv. 12, of the Auth. Yersion, the idea of height being in most cases 
preserved either in the text or margin. 

With the article, it is used in Jer. xlviii. 1, apparently to denote one of the 
fortresses of Moab. 


§ 32 . 

AROOTZ, is a word only used once in the Bible, Job xxx. 6 ; it is there 

rendered “ cliffs of the valleys ” D'brn :—but the meaning probably is, 

‘ frightful torrents,’ from ps, to terrify. 


§ 33 . 

MAALEH, 1 an ascent’ or 1 rising ground: ’ from n*», to go up ; LXX, avdfiacns 

and irp6crfia(ris. A word applied to several localities of Palestine ; viz. (1) “ the 
ascent of Akrabbim,” or of Scorpions, Num. xxxiv. 4 ; also rendered “ the going 
up to Akrabbim,” Judg. i. 36; and Maaleh-Acrabbim, Josh. xv. 3; on the south 
border of Judah—probably the Pass of Safeh: (See Chap. I., Part II., p. 99). 
(2) “the going up to (or of) Adummim ” (the ascent of the Red) a rising ground 
near Gilgal on the border between Judah and Benjamin, Josh. xv. 7; xviii. 
17, probably the Pass of Jericho (see Chap. XIII. p. 416): (3) “ the going up 
to Cur,” 2 Kings ix. 27 : (4) “the cliff of Ziz,”—the ascent of the flowers,— 
2 Chron. xx. 16. (5) “the mounting up of Luhith,” in Moab, Isai. xv. 5; 

Jerem. xlviii. 5. The word is also applied to the steep pass from Gibeon to 
Bethhoron, Josh. x. 10; and 1 Maccab. iii. 16: to the road up the Mount of 
Olives, 2 Sam. xv. 30: and to the approach to the city in which Samuel 
anointed Saul, 1 Sam. ix. 11,—“the hill to the city.” 

The words in Judg. viii. 13, rendered “ before the sun was up,”—after 
the Yulgate ante solis or turn, —probably mean ‘ from the ascent of the sun,’ or 
‘ of Heres ’ (see Gesenius s. v. p. 1030). De Wette, “ von der Anhohe Heres” 


1 The LXX appears to have read old, in this place. 




APPENDIX. 


493 


§ 34 . 

MORAD, T^ID, a 1 descent’ or steep slope : from tv, to come down (the root from 
which Jordan—‘ the descender’—probably derives his name 1 ), applied (1) to the 
declivity into the Jordan valley, down which the men of Ai chased the Israelites, 
Josh. vii. 5 (see p. 198), anb ruv Karacpepovs. (2) The descending path leading 
from Bethhoron the upper, to B. the nether. Josh. x. 10; 1 Mac. iii. 24: 
Kardpaais. (3) A descent from Horonaim in Moab ; opposed to the “ ‘ ascent ’ 
of Luhith,” Jer. xlviii. 5. 686s. 

In the above three cases, the word is rendered “ going down.” It occurs 
again in Micah i. 4—“ steep place.” 

This is probably the word represented by Kardfiaais in Luke xix. 37—“ the 
descent of the Mount of Olives.” falll 


III.—RIVERS AND STREAMS. 

§ 35 . 

NAHAR, '“in3 ‘ a (perennial) River: ’ from vi:, to flow; in contradistinction to 
Nachal (§ 39), an intermittent stream, or torrent. 

I. This word is used in the following passages of the poetical books, 

(1) for rivers generally, and for the sea : 

Job xiv. 11 ; xx. 17 ; xxii. 16; xxviii. 11.“flood.” 

Job xl. 23. ........... “river.” 

Ps. xxiv. 2 ; xlvi. 4 ; lxxviii. 16 ; xciii. 3 ; xcviii. 8 ; cv. 41 ; cvii. 33. . “river.” 

Cant. viii. 7.“floods.” 

Isai. xviii. 2, 7; xxxiii. 21 ; xli. 18; xlii. 15 ; xliii. 2, 19, 20 ; 1. 2; lvi. 12. “river.” 

(2) for “a stream of fire” in Dan. vii. 10. 

II. The word also designates more especially the great rivers of Mesopotamia 
and Egypt, in the following : the word in the English version being in every 
case “river.” 

Gen. ii. 10, 13, 14; xv. 18 ; Exod. vii. 9 ; viii. 5 ; 2 Kings v. 12; xvii. 6; xviii. 
11 ; 1 Chron. v. 26 : Ezra. viii. 15, 21, 31, 36 ; Isai. vii. 20 (Euphr.) ; xviii. 1; 
xix. 5, 6 ; Jer. ii. 18 (Euphr.) ; xlvi. 7, 8 ; Ezek. i. 1, 3 ; iii. 15, 23; x. 15, 
20, 22; xxxii. 2, 14 ; xliii. 3 ; Dan. x. 4 : Zeph. iii. 10 ; Micah vi. 1, 12, 
(Euphr.); Zech. ix. 10 (Euphr.) 

The word which the English translators, following the LXX, have ren¬ 
dered Mesopotamia, is, as may be seen in the margin of our Bibles, Aram- 
naharaim, i. e. Syria of the two rivers,—Tigris and Euphrates—for this see, 

Gen. xxiv. 10 ; Deut. xxiii. 4; Jud. iii. 8 ; Ps. lx. title ; 1 Chron. xix. 6. 

The Jordan has its own special name (§ 38), and is never spoken of topo- 


« See Chap. VII. p. 278, note 2. 






494 


APPENDIX. 


graphically by any other: but it appears to be intended in the following 
passages, which, however, may equally refer to the Red Sea: 

Ps. lvi. 6 ; Ixxiv. 15 ; 1 Hab. iii. 8, 9. 

III. But the special and distinctive meaning of Nahar, when used with the 
article, ha-Nahar, is The Euphrates (Phrat), The River of the East; whether (1) 
with the addition of the name—“ the river E.”—“ the river, the river E.”— 
“ the great river, the river E.”—or, (2) simply “ The River.” 

(1) Gen. ii. 14 ; xv. 18 ; Deut. i. 7; xi. 24 ; Josh. i. 4 ; 2 Sam. viii. 3; 2 Kings 
xxiii. 29 ; xxiv. 7; 1 Ohron. v. 9 ; xviii. 3 ; Jer. xlvi. 2, 6, 10. 

(2) Gen. xxxi. 21; xxxvi. 37; Exod. xxiii. 31 ; Numb. xxii. 5 ; xxiv. 6 ; 2 Josh, 
xxiv. 2, 3, 14, 15 : 2 Sam. x. 16 ; 1 Kings iv. 21, 24 ; xiv. 15 ; 1 Chron. i. 48 ; 
xix. 16; 2 Chron. ix. 26 ; Neh. ii. 7, 9 ; iii. 7 ; Ps. Ixxii. 8 ; lxxx. 11 ; Isai. 
viii. 7; xi. 15 ; xxvii. 12 ; xlviii. 18 ; lix. 19. 

The words so often occurring in Ezra, “beyond the river,” (mrrrw) and 
‘‘ on this side the river,” (mnrN) refer to the Euphrates. Excepting the passages 
in Joshua, and those in Isai. lix. 19, 3 and Ezek. xxxi. 15, the translation in 
the above passages is uniformly “ river.” 

IY. Nahar is used in the plural, apparently to denote the canals or branches 
of the Euphrates, in 

Ps. Ixxxix. 25 ; cxxxvii. 1 ; Isai. xliv. 27 ; xlvii. 2 ; Ezek. xxxi. 4, 15; Nah. 

z A . zz a _ 


The following are the terms which, in the imagery of the East, are 
applied to the various parts of a river. 

(а) Jad, v, a hand : used for the ‘ side’ of a river, as in the English expression, ‘to 

the right hand of the stream.’ Thus Numb. xiii. 29 (“coast”) ; Deut. ii. 37; 
Jud. xi. 26. 

(б) Saphah, rrcto, a lip: 4 the ‘ edge or brink’ of a river, or of the sea : and 

thus Gen. xxii. 17 ; xli. 3, 17 ; Exod. ii. 3 ; vii. 15 ; xiv. 30 ; Deut. ii. 
36; iv. 48; Josh. xi. 4; xii. 2 ; xiii. 9, 16 ; Jud. vii. 12, 22 ; 1 Sam. xiii. 
5 ; 1 Kings iv. 29 ; ix. 26 ; 2 Kings ii. 13 ; 2 Chron. viii. 17 ; Ezek. xlvii. 
6, 7, 12 ; Dan. xii. 5. Of the “molten sea” in Solomon’s Temple, 1 Kings 
vii. 23, 26 ; 2 Chron. iv. 2. 

(c) Lash on, Jiilft, a tongue (of the sea): from pob, to lap or lick. 

Used in Josh. xv. 2, 5 ; xviii. 19. . “bay” \o<pux. 

and in Isai. xi. 15. .... “tongue” ryv QaKaffaav Alyvirrov. 

(d) G’doth, rviTJ, ‘banks’ : of the Jordan, Josh. iii. 15; iv. 18 ; 1 Chron. xii. 15; 

and of the Euphrates, Isai. viii. 7. 

( e ) Katzeh, rrs£, the extreme edge or end of a thing, (1 Sam. xiv. 27) : from 

nsj?, to cut off the end. Thus, amongst others, 

Of a river, Josh. xv. 5 ; xviii. 19; (“end” and “uttermost part”) in this 
case the point of junction with the Dead Sea. 

Of the water, Josh. iii. 8, 15. 


1 “Mighty rivers.” “Mighty” (jrPN) is 
the word rendered “rough’’ in Deut. xxi. 4, 
and “mighty” in Amos v. 24, and really 
meaning‘perennial.’ See Nachal. 

2 See Chap. VII. p. 293. 


3 The force of the figure in this passage 
is materially increased by reading ‘ the river ’ 
(i. e. Euphrates) for “a flood.” 

4 Saphah is also used for ‘* language: ” Gen. 
xi. 1, “the whole earth was of one ‘lip.’” 






APPENDIX. 


495 


Of a lake, Numb, xxxiv. 3 ; Josh. xv. 2. 

Of a country, Gen. xlvii. 21 ; Exod. xiii. 20 ; Numb, xxxiii. 37. 

Of a mountain, Exod. xix. 12; Josh, xviii. 16. 

And of a town, Josh, xviii. 15 ; 1 Sam. xiv. 2. 

It is of frequent occurrence, and is rendered in the A. V. “border,” “brim,” 
“brink,” “edge,” “end,” “frontier,” “ outmost coast,” “outside,” “quar¬ 
ter,” “shore,” “side,” “utmost part,” &c. 

(/) Maavar, lasgo, and Ma’barah, rnasn, a pass ; from “US, to go over. Hence the 
word is used for a ford ; as, the fords of Jordan, in 

Josh. ii. 7; Jud. iii. 28.“fords.” 

Jud. xii. 5, 6.“passages.” 

Also of Jabbok, Gen. xxxii. 22 ; and of Arnon, Isai. xvi. 2. 

I is used to express a defile or pass between rocky hills at Michmash (See Chap. 
IV. p. 202). 1 Sam. xiii. 23 ; xiv. 4; Isai. x. 29 ; Jer. li. 32. LXX, 
’v tiiafidffis, and rep irtpau. In the passage from Isaiah they read (papayya. 

§ 36 . 

JOR, "VIS?, “IfcO , and once, ^s, 1 The Nile : an Egyptian word. 


It occurs in, 

Gen. xli. 1, 2, 3, 17 ; Exod. i. 22 ; ii. 3, 5 ; iv. 9 ; vii. 

15, 17, 18, 20, 21, 24, 25 ; viii. 3, 9, 11 ; xvii. 5 ; 

Isai. xxiii. 3, 10.“river.” 

Jer. xlvi. 7, 8 2 .“flood.” 

Ezek. xxix. 3, 9. “river.” 

Amos viii. 8 ; ix. 5.“flood.” 

Zech. x. 11. “river.” 

In Dan. xii. 5, 6, 7, it is applied to the river Ulai. 

The plural, Jorim, is always used for the canals of the Nile: thus, 

Exod. vii. 19 ; viii. 5 ; 2 Kings xix. 24 ; Job xxviii. 10 (tilvas tt orajuwv) ; 
Ps. lxxviii. 44 ; Isai. vii. 18. .... “rivers. 

Isai. xix. 6, 7, 8.“brooks.” 

xxxiii. 21, “streams.” didpvx^s Tr\areis Ka\ ivpvx^pot. 
xxxvii. 25 (< rwayay^v vSaros), Ezek. xxix. 3, 4, 

5, 10 ; xxx. 12 ; Nah. iii. 8.“rivers.” 


It will be observed that most of the above passages refer obviously 
to Egypt. In Job xxviii. 10, “ He cutteth out ‘ Nile-canals ’ amongst the 
rocks,”—the allusion may be to the Cataracts. In Isai. xxxiii. 21, “there 
(i. e. Jerusalem) the glorious Lord will be to us a place of broad rivers and 
‘Nile-canals,’” — the whole figure is based on a transference of Egyptian 
splendour to Judaea. In 2 Kings xix. 24 ; Isai. xxxvii. 25, and xix. 6, the word 
occurring in connexion with Jorim, and rendered “besieged (marg. fenced) 
places,” and “of defence,” namely, matzor (§ 90), is treated by Gesenius, De 
Wette, and Fiirst as being a form of the word mitzraim, and rendered ‘ Egypt ’ 
—‘ all the canals of Egyj)t.’ 

With the three exceptions noted above, the word used by the LXX is nora/xos. 

[aH] 

The other name for the Nile is :— 


1 In Ecclesiasticus xxiv. 27, this abbre¬ 
viated word “i«, has been read by the Greek 
translator as the very similar word "ritf, 

‘light.’ The passage will thus read cor¬ 
rectly as follows: “He maketh the doc¬ 
trine of knowledge to appear as ‘the Nile,’ 


and as Gichon in the time of vin¬ 
tage.” 

2 The force of this passage is obscured 
by the substitution of “a flood” for ‘the 
Nile ’ of the original. So also in the’ passages 
from Amos. 












496 


APPENDIX. 


§ 37 . 


SHICHOR, -lint?, ‘The Black River:’ from nnti, to be black (Cant. i. 5). It 


occurs Josh. xiii. 3. . 
1 Chron. xiii. 5. 
Isai. xxiii. 3. . 
Jer. ii. 18. 


“from Sihor” 

“ from Shihor of Egypt” 

‘ ‘ the seed of Sihor ” 

‘ ‘ the waters of Sihor ” . 


. curb rrjs aoiK^rov. 

. curb oplwv Alyvirrov. 
. arrepfia p.erafi6Kwv. 

. vdcojo Trjcou. 


in the two former of which passages it may be the Wady-el-Arish, elsewhere 
called “the river of Egypt.” (See Nachal.) 

In Josh. xix. 26, it is used for the little stream of the Belns—Shihor- 
Libnath—‘the Nile of glass,’—from the glass there made from the sand. 
LXX, /cal rep v Ka\ Aa/3aud9. 

It is remarkable that the renderings of the LXX should throw so little light 
on the use of these two words for the Egyptian river. [all] 


§ 38 . 

JAR’DEN, ?T“P, or (except in two cases) uniformly with the article ITfi!, “the 
descender:” The Jordan; LXX, S ’lopbavris. The various derivations pro¬ 
posed for this name are discussed by Gesenius (p. 625), who decides in favour 
of that from tv to descend. See Chap. YII. The two exceptions to the use 
of the article are Ps. xiii. 6, and Job xl. 23. In the latter instance this may 
arise from the name being used either as a representative of any river, or in 
its original meaning, as simply a rapid river. 


§ 39 . 

NACHAL, 1 ?™, ‘a torrent-bed,’ or water-course: from %n, to perforate (see 
Chap. I. p. 15). The word corresponds "with the Arabic W&dy, the Greek 
Xeipuxppovs, the Indian Nullah, and the Italian “ fiumara,”and signifies the hol¬ 
low, or valley, of a mountain torrent, which, while in rainy seasons it may fill the 
whole width of the depression, in summer is reduced to a mere brook, or thread 
of water, and is often entirely dry. (Such streams are graphically described 
in Job vi. 16, 17.) Nachal, therefore, is sometimes used for the valley (Num. xxi. 
12 ; Judg. xvi. 4), and sometimes for the torrent which flows through the valley. 
The double application of the word is well seen in 1 Kings xvii. 3, where Elijah 
is commanded to “ hide himself ‘ in’ (not “ by”) the ‘wady’ Cherith,” and 
to “ drink of the brook,”—Nachal being used in both cases. No English word 
is exactly equivalent, but perhaps ‘ torrent-bed ’ most nearly expresses it. 

The most decisive examples of its use are the Kedron, the Wady el-Arish, 
and the Kishon. 

The following is a list of the places to which it is applied, with some examples 
of the various translations of the English Version, and of the LXX :— 

1. Gerar. 

“The valley,” Gen. xxvi. 17, cv rfj rpdpayyi Tepdpccv. 

“The valley,” 1 Sam. xv. 5, iv rip xei/xdppip. 

2. Eshcol (the cluster). 

“ The brook of,” Numb. xiii. 23, ews (pdpayyos fiorpvos. 

“ The brook,” Numb. xiii. 24. 

“ The valley of,” Numb, xxxii. 9. 



APPENDIX. 


497 


3. Zared (the woody). 

“ The 'valley,” Numb. xxi. 12, els (papayya ZapeB. 
i( ^he brook Zered,” Deut. ii. 13, rrjv (papayya Zaper. Possibly also 
“The brook of the willows,” Isai. xv. 7, r)jv cp. 'Apapas (marg. “ Valley 
of the Arabians”) and 

“ The river of the ‘ Arabah,’ ” Amos vi. 14, toO x- tw v Bva/acuv. 

4. Arnon. 

“The brooks,” Numb. xxi. 14, robs x i P- ( *PP 0VS ’A pvuv. 

“The river,” Deut. ii. 24, r^v (papayya ’A. 

“The river of,” Deut. iii. 8, airo rov x«/ud/3^ou 5 A. 

5. Jabbok. 

“The brook,” Gen. xxxii. 23, rbv x^P-^PPow. 

“ The river,” Deut. ii. 37, x* l P , *pP ov 6k. 

6. Kanah. 

“The river,” Josh. xvi. 8, Vat. ini x^/caya, probably a contraction of 
NaxaA/cava. Alex, ini x €l P-dppov K ava. 

7. Kishon. 

“The river,” Jud. iv. 7 ; v. 21, x €l P<*-Pp 0VS Ktow. 

“The brook,” 1 Kings xviii. 40, rod x • Kktctuv. 

“The brook of,” Ps. lxxxiii. 9, iv rep x- Xearuv. Probably 
“The river that is before Jokneam,” Josh. xix. 11, rbjv (papayya. 

8 . Besor. 

“The brook,” 1 Sam. xxx. 9, rov x- B oaop. 

9. Sorek. 

“ The valley of,” (marg. “or by the brook of”) Jud. xvi. 4, Vat. a\aaiprjK. 
Alex, ini rov x- 

10. Kedron. 

“ The brook,” 2 Sam. xv. 23, t<£ x* r “ >u xeBpcuv (!) 

“The brook,” 1 Kings ii. 37, rov x • KeBpwv. 

“ The brook of,” Jer. xxxi. 40, ecus NaxaA Ke'Bpcov. 

11. Gaash. 

“The brooks of,” 2 Sam. xxiii. 30, Alex. XaaXyaias. 

“The brooks of,” 1 Chron. xi. 32, 4k N axaAl Taas. 

12. Cherith. 

“ The brook,” 1 Kings xvii. 3, iv rep x- Xoppa.9. 

“The river of Gad,” (marg. “ or valley ”) 2 Sam. xxiv. 5, rrjs (p. TaS. 

13. Wady-el-Arish. 

“The river of Egypt,” Numb, xxxiv. 5, x ei P-<*Pp ov s Alyvnrov. 

“The river of Egypt,” Josh. xv. 4, (papay£ A. 

“ The river of Egypt,” 1 Kings viii. 65, norapeds. 

“The stream of Egypt,” Isai. xxxvii. 12, 'PivoKopoupuv. 

14. “Valley of Shittim,” Joel iii. 18, rbv x- T &v ax°lvwv. 

The above renderings are sufficiently various, but, in addition, Nachal is 
translated “the river,” in Ps. xxxvi. 8—“the flood,” Ps. lxxiv. 15—“the 
streams,” Ps. lxxviii. 20 —“the valleys,” Ps. civ. 10 —“ the brook,” Ps. cx. 7. 

In Deut. iii. 16 it occurs as follows: “Unto the river Arnon, half the 
valley , and the border even unto the river Jabbok.” (LXX, x* l P“pP°vs in all 
three.) 

The expression D'n 'bm (‘a land of torrents of waters’) rendered in 
Deut. viii. 7 “ a land of brooks of water,” is in Deut. x. 7, “ a land of rivers of 
waters.” (LXX, x 6 ^“/¥ ot bBdrouv.) So again, the words ^ (a perennial 
torrent) are translated in Deut. xxi. 4, “ a rough valley ”—(papayya rpaxeiav — 
but in Amos v. 24 “ a mighty stream ,” x €t M* &faros. 

The LXX have once rendered the word vdnai, Numb. xxiv. 6 ; and once, 
Job xx. 17, vo/ads, apparently reading, ms, pasture. 


498 


APPENDIX, 


§ 40 . 

PELEG, 2lbQ, ‘stream possibly from ate, ‘ to divide ’ (see Gen. x. 25) like 
rims: but also probably from the idea of flowing, like ftumen, Jluctus, and 
therefore from ViB, ‘ to well up,’ as in irekayos. But in either case the word 
is always used for the flow of lesser rivulets ; and thus distinguished on the 
one hand from the great river (Nahar), and the varying wady, or mountain- 
torrent (Nachal), on the other. 

Used only in the poetical passages: as, for example, 

Judges v. 15, 16, “divisions,” jueplSes : Siaipetreis. (Probably the more correct 
rendering• of this obscure passage is, “in, or by, ‘ the streams ’ of Reuben 
great were the searchings of heart.” See Chap. VIII. p. 320.) 

Ps. i. 3, “rivers,” ras 8te|48ovy. 

Ps. xlvi. 4, “streams,” ra 5pp.-f]/u.ara. 

Ps. lxv. 9, ‘ ‘ the river of God ” (of the dew), 6 ir orap-bs tov 0eov. 

Isai. xxx. 25, “rivers,” (contrasted with Jooval), [vdcop] hiairopevS/xeyov. 

Job xx. 17, “rivers,” (contrasted with Nachal), &p.ek^iv vofiddwv. 

§ 41 . 

MICAL, bn'ft, brook: perhaps from a little water. Only occurs in 2 Sam. 
xvii. 20 ; LXX, puKpbv rod vdaros. Vulg. festinanter. 

§ 42 . 

T’ALAH, nbvp[ ‘ a conduit: ’ from nbs, to rise, the idea being of water raised for 
irrigation or other purposes: used in 1 Kings xviii. 32, 35, 38, for the “trench” 
made by Elijah round the altar of Jehovah: and specially to designate the 
canal or aqueduct by which the water was supplied to the reservoirs of Jeru¬ 
salem, 2 Kings xviii. 17 ; xx. 20 ; Isai. vii. 3 ; xxxvi. 2. See also Job xxxviii. 
25 : and, referring to irrigation, Ezek. xxxi. 4. LXX, vdpaywy6s, but once f>vcns, 
and in 1 Kings xviii. 0d\a<rcra , probably a corruption of 0aa\a } a literal 
transference of the word. [all] 


§ 43 . 

JOOVAL, bnV>, JAVAL, bn;, or OOVAL, bn^S, and bns, ‘flood stream,’ or 
‘ full river: ’ from ^, to flow tumultuously. 

Used in the poetical books only : as follows, 

Isai. xxx. 25, “streams.” 

Isai. xliv. 4, “ [water] courses,” Trapappcov. 

Jer. xvii. 8, “the river,” iir] hc/udda. 

Dan. viii. 2, 3, 6, “the river” (of Ulai), eVi tov Ovfidk. [all] 


§ 44 . 

APHIK, from , to be strong, is used throughout the poetical parts of 

Scripture in the general sense of any rush of water. Amongst other places it 
occurs in Ps. xlii. 1; Job vi. 15 (“stream”); Cant. v. 12; Isai. viii. 7; 
Ezek. vi. 3 ; xxxi. 12 ; and Joel i. 20; being translated “ stream,” “ channel,” 
“brook,” and “river.” 


APPENDIX. 499 

Other words used in the poetry of the Bible for streams or torrents are the 
following:— 


§ 45 . 

ZEREM, D'HT. Used both for a violent storm of rain, and for the “ floods,” 
(compare Matt. vii. 27) occasioned by it. Thus, amongst others, Job xxiv. 8, 
“showers;” Isa. xxv. 4, “storm;” xxviii. 2, “tempest” and “flood;” 
Hab. iii. 10, “overflowing.” 

§ 46 . 

NAZAL, Used with reference both to the sea—Exod. xv. 8, “floods”— 
and to fresh water, Ps. lxxviii. 16, “streams;” Prov. v. 15, “running 
waters.” 


§ 47 . 

SHIBBOLETH, jnV2lt{?. This is the word, the pronunciation of which was used 
to test the fugitive Ephraimites, in Judg. xii. 6. It occurs in reference to 
water, in Ps. lxix. 12, 15, “flood,” and with Nahar, in Isai. xxvii. 12, 
“ channel.” 


§ 48 . 

ESHED, "Tt£?S, Plur. Ashedoth, nm'w : from to, to break forth: the bursting 
forth of the streams from the roots of the mountains, and hence used for-the 
mountains themselves. The sense is fixed by the poetical passage, Numb. xxi. 
15, the * pouring forth’ of the ‘torrents.’ In Josh. x. 50; xii. 8, it is used 
in a general sense, but it is usually joined with Pisgah—‘ Ashdoth-pisgah’— 
viz. for the roots of the mountains east of the Jordan. See Deut. iii. 17; iv. 49; 
Josh. xii. 3; xiii. 20. ’AarjSkO tV <paayd, and tV \al-evTfiv. [all] 

Benjamin of Tudela makes Ashdoth-Pisgah to be the falls of the Jordan at 
its exit from the Lake of Gennesareth, and interprets the word to mean “ the 
place where the rapid rivers have their fall.” (See Early Travellers, p. 88.) 

§ 49 . 

MABBOOL, ‘ The Flood’: from the same root as Jooval (§ 43); used (gene¬ 

rally with the definite article) for the great Deluge, except in Ps. xxix. 10, 
where it signifies the accumulation of waters in the sky. 


§ 50. 

SHETEPH. The'word “flood” has also been used in the A.Y. for from 
to overflow. It is not used definitely, and occurs only in the following pas¬ 
sages from the poetical books: Job xxxviii. 25 ; Ps. xxxii. 6 ; Prov. xxvii. 4 ; 
Dan. ix. 26; xi. 22 ; Nah. i. 8. [all] 


K K 2 


500 


APPENDIX. 


IV.—SPRINGS, WELLS, AND PITS. 


§ 51 . 

AIN, PV) ‘a spring ’—properly an eye: the spring in an Eastern country being the 
eye of the Landscape—and thus used for a natural burst of living water, as 
distinguished from Beer (§ 55), water arrived at by digging. The word was 
common to all the oriental tongues, and still continues in Arabic. En-gedi,— 
the spring of the kid, now Ain-Jidy ,—on the western shore of the Dead 
Sea, is a good instance of the object intended. 

The importance of distinguishing between this word and Beer is illustrated 
by Exod. xv. 27, in which the word Ainoth (translated by “ Wells,”) is used for 
the springs of fresh water at Elim; —although the rocky soil of that place excludes 
the supposition of dug wells. In the parallel passage, Numb, xxxiii. 9, the 
word is rendered—with equal inaccuracy to English ears—“ fountains.” 

The names of a large number of towns and places in Palestine are formed or 
compounded of Ain (En), as is natural from the importance of living springs in 
the East. These are as follow : 

1. Ain, prn = the spring. Numb, xxxiv. 11 ; one of the landmarks on the north-east 
border of Palestine. The Vulgate is probably right in rendering it contra fontem 
Daphnin ; i. e ., the spring of Jordan at Dan, which was called Daphne; (Joseph. Ant. 
I. x. 2). LXX, iirl iryyds. 

2. Ain, one of the southernmost cities of Judah and Simeon ; Josh. xv. 32 ; xix. 7 ; 
xxi. 16 ; 1 Chron. iv. 32. LXX, ’E pepuwv. Possibly this is En-rimmon. 

3. Enam, ‘the two springs;’ in the Shephelah, Josh. xv. 34. If the LXX 

rendering tt p'os ra?s ttvXcus Alvav, of the words “in an open place,” (see margin), in 
Gen. xxxviii. 14, 21, be correct, this place is probably intended, Timnath being a 
Philistine city also in the Shephelah. (Zunz : an den Eingang der Doppelquelle. 
De Wette : ins Thor von Enaim.) Comp. Judg. xiii. 25, and xiv.l, with Josh. xv. 
33, 34. 

4. En-dor, ‘the spring of Dor’ ; Josh. xvii. 11; 1 Sam. xxviii. 7; Ps. Ixxxiii. 10. 
LXX, ’A evSwp. 

5. En-eglaim, ‘the spring of the two calves,’ on the shore of the Dead Sea; Ezek. 
xlvii. 10. LXX, ’EvayaWeip.. 

6. En-gannim, ‘the spring of gardens ; ’ a town in the Shephelah ; Josh. xv. 34. 

7. En-gannim, a Gershonite town in Issachar; Josh. xix. 21; xxi. 29. LXX, wnyti 
ypappaTuv. The modern Jenin, see Chap. IX. p. 342. 

8. En-gedi, ‘spring of the kid; ’ Josh. xv. 62 ; 1 Sam. xxiii. 29 ; xxiv. 1 ; 2 Chron. 
xx. 2 ; Ezek. xlvii. 10 ; Cant. i. 14 ; Eccles. xxiv. 14 (Engaddi). LXX, ’ Ay Kabys, 
’I vyaBelv, ’EyyatiSt, iv alyiaXols. See Chap. YII. p. 289. 

9. En-haddah, ‘ the strong spring ; ’ Josh. xix. 21. LXX, A IpapeK. 

ID. En-hak-Kore, ‘ the spring of the crier; ’ iryy^ rot) iiriKaXov/j.ivov. Judg. xv. 19. 

11. En-hazor (Chatzor) ; Josh. xix. 37. LXX, mjy^ ’A <r6p. 

12. En-mishpat, ‘spring of judgment;’ “ which is Kadesh.” Gen. xiv. 7. LXX, 
vyyy rys Kpicreus. 

13. En-rimmon, ‘spring of pomegranates; ’ Neh. xi. 29 ; unless this is formed by the 
erroneous combination of the two places, Ain and Rimmon; (see Josh. xv. 32 ; 
xix. 7; 1 Chr. iv. 32.) 


APPENDIX. 


501 


14. En-rogel, ‘spring of the foot’ ; possibly from fullers treading it with their feet 
(Targum); possibly from its waters being drawn up by a machine worked with the 
foot (Deut. xi. 10). Josh. xv. 7 ; xviii. 16 ; 2 Sam. xvii. 17; 1 Kin. i. 9. LXX, 
m] 7)7 ’Pory^A.. 

15. En-shemesh, ‘ spring of the sun ; ’ Josh. xv. 7 ; xviii. 17. LXX, tj TT7\y)] tov 
rj\lov —ir. B aiBaauvs. Vulg., ad En-semes, id est, Fontem Solis. 

16. En-tappuah,—near the town of that name ; Josh. xvii. 7. There were also : 

17. ‘The spring in Jezreel,’ “a fountain which [is] in Jezreel.” 1 Sam. xxix. 1, pos¬ 
sibly the same as, 

18. “The Well of Harod.” Ain-charod —‘ the spring of trembling.’ Judg. vii. 1. 

19. “ The Dragon Well.” Ain-tannim —‘ the spring of dragons.’ Neh. ii. 13. 

20. “The spring’ of water in the wilderness—the ‘spring’ in the way to Shur.” 
Gen. xvi. 7. 

21. In the New Testament the word appears as iEnon, i. e. ‘springs ;’ “near to Salim ” : 
John iii. 23. ’Aiv&v. 

When applied to water, the word Ain is translated in the E. Y. “ well,” with 
the following exceptions, in which it is rendered “ fountain.” 

Gen. xvi. 7; Numb, xxxiii. 9; (comp. Exod. xv. 27 “wells;”) Deut. viii. 7; 
xxxiii. 28 ; 1 Sam. xxix. 1; 2 Chron. xxxii. 3 ; Neh. ii. 14; iii. 15; xii. 37 ; 
Prov. viii. 28. 


§ 52 . 


MA’AN, ‘ a collection of springs,’ or place watered by springs: from p?, 

a spring. Topographically used, the word occurs in 


Josh. xv. 9 . 

Josh, xviii. 15 . 

1 Kings xviii. 5 . 

2 Kings iii. 19, 25 . 
2 Chron. xxxii. 4 


. “fountain” 

. “well” In the LXX 

. “fountains” all these 

“wells” are Tnjyf], 

“fountains” 


It is also found in the following: 

Gen. vii. 11; viii. 2 ; Lev. xi. 36 ; Ps. lxxiv. 15 ; cxiv. 8 ; Prov. v. 16 ; viii. 
24; xxv. 26; Cant. iv. 12, 15; Isai. xli. 18; Hos. xiii. 15; Joel iii. 18, 
all rendered “fountain.” Ps. lxxxiv. 6; Isai. xii. 3, “well;” and Ps. lxxxvii. 
7; civ. 10, “springs.” [ah] 


§ 53 . 


MOTZA, ‘ springhead: ’ from to go forth. 


Used 2 Kings ii. 21 . • • • • • •„ 

2 Chron. xxxii. 30 (of the spring of Gihon) . . watercourse 


AlsoinPs.cvii. 33, 35 . • “ watersprings” 

Isai. xli. 18 (contrasted with Agam); lvm. 11. . spring 


7] 8ie£of)OS. 

7] e|o5os. 

(omitted). 

vSpaywyds. 

[all] 


502 


APPENDIX. 


§ 54 . 

MAKOR, npp, 1 wellspring :’ from "np, to dig for water (2 Kings xix. 24), a word 
used only in the poetical and rubrical books, and variously rendered by spring, 
fountain, well, well-spring and issue. See Jer. li. 36; Ps. xxxvi. 9 ; Prov. x. 
11; xvi. 22; Lev. xii. 7, &o. &c. 


§ 55 . 

GULLOTH, bubblings: from %a, to tumble or roll over, in allusion 

perhaps to the globular form in which springs bubble up. Used only to 
designate the two springs given by Caleb to his daughter Achsah. Josh. xv. 
19; Judg. i. 15. LXX, Josh. 54s fioi r^u B ordavis. Kal £$<dko/ avrfj r^v Tovai6\av 
&vu> Kal ryv T. t^v K&roi : Judg. Kvrpcoffiv fierecopav Kal A. Tairtivwv. Symm. 
apdelav. 

The word occurs in the shorter form of 

GAL, *?2, (strictly ‘heap,’ J ) in Cant. iv. 12 (“spring”), and also in Ps. xlii. 7 ; 
cvi. 25; Isai. xlviii. 18; Jonah ii. 3, and elsewhere, for the “billows” or 
“ waves” of the sea. 

Possibly Gallim (1 Sam. xxv. 44; Isai. x. 30) derived its name from the 
neighbourhood of such bubbling springs. 

The word commonly used for a “heap” of water, as in Exod. xv. 8; 
and Ps. lxxviii. 13, is Ned (t?). See Chap. YII. p. 298, note. 

§ 56 . 

MABBOOA, 2*12)2, 1 a gushing spring’; from 5£3, to gush forth. See Isaiah xxxv. 
7; xlix. 10 (“springs”), and Eccl. xii. 6 (“fountain”). LXX, nyy 


§ 57 . 

B’ER, ")S2, from “wa, to dig, (the same root as forare , and bore): 1 a well,’ that is, 
a dug pit, usually with water at the bottom. The meaning of the word is fixed 
by the numerous vestiges of such wells still remaining and bearing their ancient 
names. They have a broad margin of masonry round the mouth, and often a 
stone filling up the orifice. See Chap. II. p. 146. 

The following are the Beers named in the Bible: 

1. Beer-lachai-roi, ‘the well of the vision of life,’ Gen. xvi. 14 ; xxiv. 62 ; xxv. 11. 

2. Beer-sheba, ‘the well of swearing,’ according to Gen. xxi. 31, and xxvi. 33 ; or 

according to De Wette, ‘the well of seven.’ (Comp. xxi. 29, 30 : Sheba= seven.) 

3. Beeroth-bene-Jaakan, ‘the wells of the sons of Jaakan,’ in the Desert; Deut. x. 6. 

In Numb, xxxiii. 31, “Bene-Jaakan” only. 

4. Beeroth, ‘Wells,’ one of the cities of the Gibeonites. Josh. ix. 17 ; Ezra ii. 25, &c. 

5. Beer, the well dug by the children of Israel close to the border of Moab (Num. 

xxi. 16), and therefore probably the same as 

6. Beer-elim, ‘ Well of heroes ; ’ Isai. xv. 8. 


1 Compare the expression in old English poetry ; “the heaped spring ”; “the heaped 
water.” 




APPENDIX. 


503 


7. Beer; Judges ix. 21. 

8. Baalath-beer, ‘ the lady of the well; ’ Josh. xix. 8. 

9. Berothah; Ezekiel xlvii. 16; and 

10. Berothai, 2 Sam. viii. 8, both apparently the same place, which has been con¬ 
jectured to be the city Berytus. See Gesenius, p. 176. 

Three wells digged by Isaac’s herdsmen, and called Esek (strife), Sitnah 
(hatred), and Rechoboth (room), are named in Gen. xxvi. 20, 21, 22; and a 
memorable well in the court of a house at Bachurim is mentioned in 2 Sam. 
xvii. 18 (LXX, Acbc/cos). 

In our version Beer is throughout rendered “ well,” with four exceptions. 
These are Gen. xiv. 10; Ps. lv. 23; lxix. 15 ; and Prov. xxiii. 27, where it is 
translated ‘ pit.’ In the LXX it is generally Qpeap . Vulg. Putens. 


§ 58 . 

AGAM, DJW, ‘ pond,’ of stagnant water: from djn, to be warm like boiling 
water : specially of the pools left by the inundations of the Nile. Exod. vii. 
19; viii. 5. LXX, Stdpuyas. Such pools were reedy, and thus in Jer. li. 32, 
the word is put for “ reeds.” Ps. cvii. 35, and cxiv. 8, “ standing water.” 


§ 59 . 


MIK’YEH, n)|7p, or (once) Mikvah, rn;?p, ‘ reservoir ’; a place where waters flow 
together: from nij?, to be collected. This word occurs as follows in relation 
to water:— 


Gen. i. 10. . 
Exod. vii. 19 
Lev. xi. 36. 
Isaiah, xxii. 11 


“gathering together.” 
(with agam) “pools.” 
“plenty” [of water] . 
“ditch” 


ra (rv(TTr)p.aTc, 
rh e\T]. 
auvaywyf]. 

vdcop. (Gesenius ein Behalter.) 


§ 60 . 


B’RECAH, ‘pool’ or artificial tank; (derivation uncertain); hence the 

Arabic Birket,’and the Spanish Al-berca. The pools still remaining at Hebron 
are actual examples of the meaning of the word. In the English Version it is 
uniformly rendered “ pool.” Such tanks existed at various places ; 


1. Gibeon 

2. Hebron 

3. Samaria . 

4. Jerusalem 

a. Upper pool. 

b. Lower pool 

c. Old pool 

d. King’s pool 

e. A fifth appears to be mentioned in 
/. Siloah or Siloam 

g. Bethesda ..... 

5. Heshbon (fish-pools) .... 


. 2 Sam. ii. 13. 

. Ditto, iy. 12. 

. 1 Kings xxii. 38. 

2 Kings xviii. 17 ; Isai. vii. 3 ; xxxvi. 2. 
. Isai. xxii. 9. 

Ditto, xxii. 11. 

Neh. ii. 14 ; Eccl. ii. 6. 

Neh. iii. 16. 

Neh. iii. 15 ; John ix. 7. 

John y. 2. KoXv/xfi’fidpa. 

Cant. vii. 4. 


The LXX have translated the word oftenest by KoXv/xfa'idpa ; but also by Kp4\v r?, and 
once by Aly-vy. 



504 


APPENDIX. 


§ 61 . 

C’ROTH, nhs, ‘ cisterns’ or dug wells for sheep; from rns, to dig : only used 
once, Zeph. ii. 6, and there translated “ cottages.” From the same root is 
derived 


§ 62 . 

MIC’REH, which likewise occurs but once, in Zeph. ii. 9, where it i3 

rendered (salt) “pit.” 


§ 63 . 

MASH^ABIH, O'DNtpfc: from 38®, to draw water: used only in Judg. v. 11, 
probably for the troughs into which the water for the cattle was poured (the 
verb is used with this special signification in Gen. xxiv. 19, 20, 44, 45, &c.). 
LXX, vtipevdfjLtva; De Wette, schopfrinnen ; E. Y. “the places of drawing water.’, 


§ 64 . 

BOR, and '"03, ‘ a cistern’ or ‘ pit ’: from the same root as Beer, and with 

nearly the same signification. Bor, however, is often used for a pit not contain¬ 
ing water, a sense in which Beer is only once found (possibly 2 Sam. xvii. 18). 

Such was the “pit” into which Joseph was cast, Gen. xxxvii. 20. Pits 
without water are also named in 1 Sam. xiii. 6 ; 2 Sam. xxiii. 20 ; 1 Chron. xi. 
22; and ‘ the house of the pit’ occurs with the meaning of dungeon in Gen. 
xl. 15 ; xli. 14 ; Exod. xii. 29, and in Jer. xxxvii. 16 and xxxviii. InZech. ix. 
11, “the pit”=dungeon. (Compare puteus , which also has this double meaning.) 

Bor is however used for a receptacle for water—whether springing or col¬ 
lected is not indicated—though the “broken cisterns” of Jer. ii. 13, and the 
“ stones of the pit,” in Isaiah, xiv. 19, show that such cisterns were sometimes 
built, and not always “digged,” as in Deut. vi. 11; 2 Chron. xxvi. 10; Exod. 
xxi. 33. 

The name is borne by 

1. “ ‘The’ great well in Sechu,” 1 Sam. xix. 22; rov (pptaros rov a\u rov iv r$ 2e<?u. 

2. “The well of Sirah,” 2 Sam. iii. 26 ; rnDn '2, <ppeap rov 2*eipd/x. 

3. “ The well of Bethlehem,” 2 Sam. xxiii. 15, and 1 Chron. xi. 17. 

4. “ The pit” at Mizpah, Jer. xli. 7, 9, (comp. 2 Kings xxv. 25). 

The word is extensively used in the poetical parts of the Scripture ; as Ps. 
vii. 15; Isaiah, xiv. 15; Ezek. xxvi. 20, &c. In Jer. vi. 7, it is translated 
“ fountain.” The Keri, however, in this place reads Bair. 

Other words of this class, but not employed with topographical 
exactness, are— 


§ 65 . 

GEB, 2S, or N53, a ‘ditch’ or ‘trench.’ 2 Kings, iii. 16; Isaiah, xxx. 14; Jer. xiv. 
3; Ezek. xlvii. 11, (“marshes ”). A place of this name, Gebim, near Jerusalem, 
is mentioned in Isaiah, x. 31. 


APPENDIX. 


505 


§ 66 . 

PACHATH, nn5, ‘a hollow’; used in 2 Sam. xvii. 9, and xviii. 17 ; and also 
figuratively in Isaiah, xxiv. 17, 18; Jer. xlviii. 43, 44. In these passages it is 
rendered “ pit; ” in Jer. xlviii. 28, “ hole”; and in Lam. iii. 47, “ snare,” which 
indeed seems to he the idea at the root of the word. 


§ 67 . 

SHUCHAH or SHACHATH, PITOtS or nnt», a ‘pitfall’; i.e. a trap: used fre- 
quently, hut only in the poetical hooks, and figuratively; e.g. Psalm ix. 15; Prov. 
xxvi. 27 ; Jer. ii. 6; xviii. 20. It is variously rendered pit, ditch, destruc¬ 
tion, corruption, and grave. 


$ 68 . 

GOOMMATZ, <a sunk pit’; from ypj, to dig: only used once, viz., in 

Eccl. x. 8. LAX, fS60f)ov. 


§ 69 . 

MAHAMOROTH, fYnfen£, 1 gulfs ’ or ‘ whirlpools’; only in Psalm cxl. 10, where 
it is rendered “ deep pits.” 


Y. CAYES. 

‘ § 70 . 

M’ARAH, rP3?b> ‘ a cave ’; from to, to excavate. Arabic, Meghara. 

The caves of Palestine are, 

1. The cave of Adullam, in which David lived with his followers; 1 Sam. xxii. 1 ; 

2 Sam. xxiii. 13. 

2. The cave of Makkedah, in which the five kings of the Amorites took refnge from 

Joshua ; Josh. x. 16, &c. 

3. The cave in the wilderness of Engedi, in the ‘thighs’ of which David and his men 

remained undiscovered by Saul; 1 Sam. xxiv. 3. 

4. The cave in which Obadiah hid fifty prophets of Jehovah from the vengeance of 

Jezebel; 1 Kings xviii. 4. 

Besides the above, are the cave above Zoar, Gen. xix. 30; of Machpelah, 
Gen. xxiii. xxv. xlix.; “‘the’ cave ” in Horeb—the scene of the vision of 
Elijah—1 Kings xix. 9; and a cave in the north of Palestine, near Sidon, 
literally rendered “Mearah,” Josh. xiii. 4. 

The word is rendered “holes” in Isai. ii. 19 ; and “den” in Isai. xxxii. 
14, and Jer. vii. 11. 


§ 71 . 


CHOU, Tin, or Th and CHUR, “Wl, ‘ hole ’: from Tin, to bore (see 2 Kings xii. 9). 
Hence, a hole in the rock or earth, as in 1 Sam. xiv. 11, and Job xxx. 6, 



50G 


APPENDIX. 


(“caves”),—a passage containing a remarkable description 1 of the wretched 
fate of an early people who must have been similar to .the Chorim (Horim, 
Hori, Horites, of the E. Y.—the troglodytes, or dwellers in holes and caverns 
LXX, Xoppcuoi) —apparently (Hen. xxxvi. 20) the original inhabitants of Pales¬ 
tine, and who lived in the cavities of the sandstone rocks of Petra until “ the 
children of Esau destroyed them before them, and dwelt in their stead,” to be 
in their turn dispossessed by Israel; Deut. ii. 12. 

The district of Chauran (Hauran, Auran , * Avpavvns ) Ezek. xlvii, 16, north¬ 
east of Hermon, derived its name from similar caves, many of which are 
found to the present day in use as habitations. (See Burckhardt, Syria, i. 110.) 

The word is found in the following names of places :— 

Beth-horon, ‘the house of holes,’ Josh. x. 10, xvi. 3, 5, &c. 

— horonaim, ‘two holes,’ Isai. xv. 5 ; Jer. xlviii. 3, 34 ; whence Choronite 

Nehem. ii. 10, &c. 

— hor-ha-gidgad, ‘the hole of much water,’ a station in the Desert. Num. 

xxxiii. 32. 


§ 72 . 

ll’CHILLOTH, nibna, ‘fissures’ or caverns : from ^n, to dig open. Only used 
once, Isai. ii. 19, and there in contrast with Mearah ; “go into the ‘ caves ’ of 
the rocks, and into the ‘ fissures ’ of the earth.” 


$ 73 . 

MIN^HAROTH, iTpn^ft, only occurs once, viz., in Judges vi. 2, to describe the 
hiding-places., or ‘ burrows,’ in which the Israelites took refuge fromMidian,— 
at least such is the meaning given to it in the Targum. LXX, rpvfxaXlai. 

For the remainder of the words for caves or clefts, see Tzur § 28, Sela § 29 ; 
also § 66, 67, 68, 97, 98. 


VI. FORESTS AND TREES. 

§ 74 . 

CHORE SH, ‘ a wood; ’ indeed a thick growth of vegetation, whether in a 

single tree or in a copse. Thus in Ezek. xxxi. 3, it is used for the thick foliage 
—the “ shadowing shroud ”—of the cedar. Elsewhere the word is employed 
for a wood, though apparently never like Ja-ar (§ 75) for a tract of any extent. 

1. The “wood in the wilderness of Ziph,” 1 Sam. xxiii. 15, 16, 18, 19. eV rfj 

Kaiiqj . 2 

2. 2 Chron. xxvii 4 . “forests,” iv ro7s $pv/Ao?s. 

3. Isai. xvii. 9. “bough,” Gesenius, im Walddichicht. 


1 See Ewald, Geschichte, 2nd. Edit. i. as the rendering of the similar word \zhn. for 

304. which, in this instance, snn has probably 

2 kcuv6s is elsewhere given in the LXX been mistaken. 







APPENDIX. 


507 


§ * 5 . 

JAAR, 1 a forest,’ or dense growth of trees : from "fi£ to abound. In the his¬ 
torical books it is the usual name for the wooded tracts of Palestine, East and 
West, and is used for,— 

“ The forest of Hareth.” 1 Sam. xxii. 5. 

“The forest of Lebanon.” 1 Kings vii. 2, x. 17, 21; 2 Chron. ix. 16, 20. 

“The wood of Ephraim.” 2 Sam. xviii. 6, 8, 17. See also Josh. xvii. 15, 18; 

1 Sam. xiv. 25, 26 ; 2 Kings ii. 24 ; in all which it is rendered “ wood.” 

In the poetical parts of Scripture it often occurs, and is generally translated 
“ forest; ” the exceptions being Deut. xix. 5; 1 Chron. xvi. 33 ; Ps. lxxx. 13, 
lxxxiii. 14, xcvi. 12, cxxxii. 6; Eccl. ii. 6; Cant. ii. 3; Isa. vii. 2; Ezek. 
xxxiv. 25 ; Mic. vii. 14, in which the word used is “ wood.” It appears in the 
well-known name of Kirjath Jearim (city of forests), and of Mount Jearim 
Josh. xv. 10. 

In 1 Sam. xiv. 27 and Cant. v. 1, the word is applied to a honeycomb; 
that is, an abundant quantity of honey. LXX, (1) rb icnp'iov rov jue\iros. 

(2) &pTOV fJLOV. 


§ 76 . 

PAR DES, DT^Q ‘ a plantation ; ’ perhaps from *ns, to enclose. 

Occurs three times : viz. 

Neh. ii. 8, “forest,” where it plainly refers to timber trees. 

Eccl. ii. 5 ; Cant. iv. 13 ; “orchard,” where the reference is as plainly to fruit trees. 

It is probably a Persian word, adopted into the Semitic languages, and then 
Grecised into “ Paradise,” tt apddeiaos; by which word it is translated in the LXX. 
Elsewhere, they have employed ir apabeuros as the equivalent to Gan, a garden. 
The diminutive “Fureidis” in Arabic is applied in Palestine to the “ Frank 
Mountain,” from its vicinity to Solomon’s Gardens at Urtas. See Chap. III. 


§ 77 . 

ETZ, 1 a tree,’ in the widest sense of the word: thus Gen. i. 29; ii. 16; Deut* 
xii. 2 ; Josh. x. 16 (comp. Acts x. 39); Isai. vii. 2, and passim : also “wood,” 
Ex. vii. 19; Lev. xi. 32; 1 Sam. vi. 14, &c.—“timber,” 1 Kings v. 6, &c.; 
—“ stick,” Num. xv. 32 ; 1 Kings xvii. 10. Hence, too, the staff of a spear, 
1 Sam. xvii. 7, or handle of an axe, Deut. xix. 5 (a verse in which the word 
occurs twice—as “tree,” and “helve.”) 

From rra?, to be firm. In a slightly varied form it signifies a backbone; 
whence i&ion-Geber, ‘ the giant’s backbone.’ See Chap. I. p. 84. 


§ 78 . 

EL: ELAH: ELON: and ILAN: from tow or ‘ph, to be strong; and ALLAH, 
and ALLON: from *&$, with the same meaning: ‘ A strong tree.’ 

The use of these various forms of the same or similar roots is so indefinite, 
and the translations of them in the ancient Versions so inconsistent, that it is 
not possible to fix their meaning with accuracy. The following are the con¬ 
clusions of Gesenius (Thesaurus, pp. 51 (a), 47, 103). 


508 


APPENDIX. 


1. El may be either an oak or a terebinth. 

2. Where Allon is opposed to Elah, as in Isai. vi. 13 ; Hos. iv. 13 ; Elah=terebinth 
and Allon=oak. But, on the other hand, 

3. Elah, Allon, Allah, and Elon, appear to have been all interchangeable, for the 
same tree which in Josh. xix. 33 is Allon, in Jud. iv. 11 is Elon ; while that which is 
Elon in Jud. ix. 6 (English Version, “plain”) is Elah in Gen. xxxv. 4, and Allah in 
Josh. xxiy. 26. See Chapter II. p. 140. 

1. El, Vs, occurs in the singular, only in Gen. xiv. 6, El-paran: LXX, 
rrjs Tcpefiivdov rrjs cpapav. Aq. Symm. Theod. « os dpvos. 

In the plural, Elim, 

Isai. i. 29. “ oaks.” ddcoAa. 

Isai. lxi. 3. “ trees.” yeveal. Symm. itrxvpdi. 

Ezek. xxxi. 14. “ trees.” omitted. 

Elim, the second station from the Red Sea, appears to have derived its 
name from the 70 palms there— the trees of the Desert. (Chap. I., pp. 
22, 68). See Exod. xv. 27, xvi. 1; Num. xxxiii. 9, 10. So also, 
Eloth, or Elath, another plural form of the same word, probably refers to 
the palm-grove at Akaba (Chap. I. pp. 22, 84). See Deut. ii. 8; 
1 Kings ix. 26; 2 Kings xiv. 22, xvi. 6; 2 Chron. viii. 17. xxvi. 2. 

2. Elah, Jibs, perhaps ‘terebinth.’ 

Gen. xxxv. 4, “the oak,” f) TepefiivOos. Aq. Symm. Theod. rrjv dpvv. 

Jud. vi. 11, 19, “oak,” f) repepivOos. Theod. dpvs. In both cases with the 
article, ‘ the Terebinth.’ 

1 Sam. xvii. 2, 19, xxi. 9, “Elah,” (Heb. Ha-Elah, l the Terebinth’.) HAa. 

Aq. Theod. rrjs dpvos. 

2 Sam. xviii. 9, 10, 14, “oak.” In each of these passages the definite 

article is used, h dpvs : dsvdpov. 

1 Kings xiii. 14 (article); 1 Chron. x. 12, “oak,” dpvs. 

Isai. i. 30, “oak”; yi. 13, “teil tree.” Aq. Symm. Th. dpvs. LXX, repefiivOos. 
Ezek. vi. 13, “oak,” de'vdpov avaKiov : dpvs. 

Hos. iv. 13, “elms,” LXX, and Theod. dcvdpov avauid^ovTos. Aq. rcpefiivQos, 
Symm. irAdravos. 

3. Elon, fibs, probably * oak.’ 

Gen. xii. 6 ; Deut. xi. 30, “plain of Moreh,” '77 dpvs 'rj vxprjAr}. Aq. 

Symm. avAuvos Ka.Tacpa.vovs : Convallem illustrem. 

Gen. xiii. 18, xiv. 13, xviii. 1, “plainof Mamre,” '77 dpvs 'rj p-apfSpr]. Convallis 
Mambre. 

Jud. iv. 11, “Plain of Zaanaim” (‘wanderers’), dp. ttAcovcktovvtuv. Ad 
vallem quce vocatur Sennim. 

Jud. ix. 6 , “Plain of the Pillar,” rfj fiaAdvcp rfj evperfj rrjs ardtrecos. Aq. nediov 
<TT7]Ac!}pLaTos. Sym. dp. '77 kcn&cra. Quercum quce stabat in Sichem. 

Jud. ix. 37, “ Plain of Meonenim ” (the enchantments;, *HAo>j/ ixacavevip. Aq. 
dpvs dirofiAendvrcov. Per viam quce respicit quercum. This is probably 
the same tree as that in Gen. xxxv. 4. See Elah. 

1 Sam. x. 3, “ Plain of Tabor,” '77 dpvs Qafioop. Ad quercum Tabor. 

Elon, liVs, town in Dan, Josh. xix. 43, possibly the same as that called 
E. -beth-hanan in 1 Kings ix. 9. 

4. Ilan, ‘a great tree.’ 

Dan. iv. T 10, 11, 14, 20, 23, 26; “tree.” 

5. Allah, nbs. 

Josh. xxiv. 26, “oak,” 'virb t)]v rep/xivOov. 

Alla-melech, the “king’s oak,” a city of Asher, Josh. xix. 26. 

6. Allon, libs, in A.V. uniformly “ oak.” 

Gen. xxxv. 8 , virb tV fidAavov ; wrongly rendered “an oak.” 

Isai. ii. 13, “ofBashan,” dcvdpov fiaAavov. Aq. dpvs. 




APPENDIX. 


509 


Isai. vi. 13, (with Elah ; see No. 2,) Pakavos. 

Isai. xliv. 14 ,Alex. 8pvs. 

Ezek. xxvii. 6, (“ of Bashan ”); LXX omits. 

Hos. iv. 13, (with Elah, see No. 2); Amos ii. 9 ; Zech. xi. 2 (“of Bashan”), 8pvs. 
Allon-bach uth, Gen. xxxv. 8. fiaXavos irevdovs. Sam. Ver. nn'Dii Taro, 

Allon, in Naphtali, Josh. xix. 33. “Allon to Zaanannim” (D'33^33 ^h) 
is probably Allon-zaanaim, Jud. iv. 11; see above under Elon. 


§ 79 . 

ESHEL, probably a tamarisk ( Tamarix orientalis , Linn.), see Gesenius, 

s. v. p. 159 : but the exact signification is doubtful, since it will be seen that 
in the third of the following examples, it is interchangeable with Elah (§ 78, 2). 

Occurs three times: 

In Gen. xxi. 33, “grove.” Aq. 8evSpShva. Symm. (pvreiav. 

1 Sam. xxii. 6, “a tree,” accurately, 1 the tamarisk. Aq. rb bevdpoo/ua. 

1 Sam. xxxi. 13, “a tree.” Symm. <pvr6v. Theod. ras Spvs —like the preceding, 
with the definite article, and therefore, “ ( the tamarisk’ at Jabesh.” In the 
parallel passage, 1 Chr. x. 12, the word is Elah. The lxx have, in each case, 
rendered Eshel by 'tj apovpa — the field. 

Besides the aboye, there are other words for trees which need not be spe¬ 
cially examined here. Amongst them are some which would seem to have 
given their names to places ; viz., Rimmon,—Pomegranate (Numb, xxxiii. 19; 
Josh. xv. 32 ; xix. 45 ; 1 Chron. vi. 77 ; Neh. xi. 29 ;—§ 51): Luz,—Almond 
(Gen. xxxv. 6): Tamar,—Palm (Gen. xiv. 7; Judg. xx. 33; Deut. xxxiv. 3; 
Judg. i. 16;—§ 80): Shittah (Plur. Shittim),—Acacia (Judg. vii. 22; Numb, 
xxv. 1): and Libneh,—White Poplar (Numb, xxxiii. 20; Josh. x. 29). A 
different derivation of Libnah has been given in Chap. YI. p. 253, note, which 
is probably equally correct. It is worth notice, however, that the three 
“stations” named in Numb, xxxiii. 18 (Rithmah,—Broom), 19, and 20, all 
apparently derive their names from some natural feature of vegetation. 


The word rendered “ Grove ” in the A.Y. in connection with the idolatrous 
worship of the Canaanites, is Asherah. For an examination of all the 
passages in which it occurs, and of its doubtful and difficult signification, see 
Gesenius, s. v. p. 162. 



510 


APPENDIX. 


VII. CITIES, HABITATIONS, &c. 

§ BO. 

IR,"TO, or AR, 'IJ, ‘a city:’ probably from a root now extinct, signifying to 
surround : LXX, Yulg. Oppidum. Tbe idea is that of a fortified place, 

as in 2 Kings x. 25, where itsignifi.es “the ‘ fortress 1 of the ‘temple’ 
of Baal;” and in 1 Chr. xi. 5, “David took the Castle (Metzadah, §89) 
of Zion, which is the City of David.” See also 2 Kings xvii. 9; xviii. 8. 
Its general meaning is fixed by the examples of Jerusalem, Samaria, and 
Jericho, and the cities of Assyria, to which it is frequently applied. 

In Lev. xxv. 29, 31, “walled cities,” are distinguished from “villages 
(Hazerim) which have no wall round them; ” and in 1 Sam. vi. 18, we find 
“fenced cities,” distinguished from ‘ country villages,’ (Caphar). 

Generally, whenever the “ gates ” or “walls” of a “ city ” are spoken of, the 
word used is Ir. See especially Gen. xxiii. 10, 18, xxxiv. 20, 24; Josh. viii. 29, 
xx. 4. Judg. xvi. 2, 3; 1 Sam. xxiii. 7 ; 1 Kings iv. 13, xvii. 10; 1 Chr. 
xix. 9; 2 Chr. viii. 5; indeed in Ruth iii. 11, “gate” is used as 
synonymous with “city,” and is so translated in the A. Y. (see margin). 
On the other hand, in Deut. iii. 5, we read of “unwalled ‘cities,’” LXX, 
7r<{A6« t&v (pepe^a iW (see § 82). 

A curious play upon the word occurs in Jud. x. 4, where the same word 
is used for the thirty cities (d’TO) and the “thirty ass-colts” (d'vs) of the 
sons of Jair. This play has been tolerably preserved in the LXX by rendering 
the words respectively u-tfAeis and ttooKovs. 

In the Auth. Yers. with the following exceptions, the word is rendered 
“city.” 

“Town.” Dent. iii. 5 ; 1 Sam. xvi. 4, xxiii. 7, xxvii. 5; Esther ix. 19 (iv 
TracTT) T V H 60 -) J er - xix. 15. 

“Court.” 2 Kings xx. 4. iv avArj rrj /xiat ?. 

It occurs in the following proper names :—- 

1. Ir-hat-temarim, “the city of ‘the’ Palmtrees.” LXX, tt6\is ruv (poivlucov. Deut. 

xxxiv. 3 ; Jud. i. 16, iii. 13 ; 2 Chron. xxviii. 15. (See p. 143, and 289, note.) 

2. Ir-ham-melach, “the city of salt,” Alex, tj tt6\is a\6ov. Vat. i r. SaScDj/. Josh. xv. 62. 

3. Ir-Shemesh (ir6\eis ’Xap./xdvs) (=Beth Shemesh, ‘the city of the sun’). Josh. xix. 41. 
4„ Ir-nahash, tt6\is vaas, 1 Chron. iv. 12, (‘the city of the serpent’). 

5. Ir-ha-heres, “the city of destruction,” and “of the sun.” Isai. xix. 18. Compl. 
tt67us a Vat. acrcSe/c. 

6. Rechoboth-Ir, “the city Rehoboth.” Gen. x. 11. Yulg. plateas civkatis, 

AR, 'll?, as the name of the capital of Moab (=Rabbah), or rather perhaps 
of the whole country of the Moabites, occurs in Numb. xxi. 15 ; Deut. ii. 9, 18, 
29 ; and more fully as “ Ar of Moab,” in Numb. xxi. 28, and Isai. xv. 1. In 
Numb. xxi. 28, the LXX seem to have read with the Samaritan Codex and 
Yersion, ts, for they render it ecos McvajS. Elsewhere the Samaritan Yer- 
sion gives Arshah; and the LXX Hp in Numbers, and ’Apovp in Deut. In 
Numb. xxii. 36, Ar Moab is rendered “ a city of Moab,” following the Sam. 
Yersion, Kiriath Moab (see § 75,) the LXX els n6\iv M., and the Yul°\ in 
oppido Moab . 




APPENDIX. 


511 


§ 81 . 

KIR, "P|7: possibly from rnp, to build; or from mp, to dig (see Gesenius, 1210, 
1236.) 

(а) Usually for the wall of a bouse or building, exterior or interior ( =paries ), as in Lev. 

xiv. 37. 1 Sam. xx. 25. 1 Kings vi. 5. Ezek. xxiii. 14, &c, 

(б) For the side of the altar. Lev. i. 15 ; v. 9. 

(c) For a fence or enclosure. Num. xxii. 25. 

(d) For the wall of a town, (once) Num. xxxv. 4. 

The usual word for the wall of a city (Engl, “the walls,” mcenia ) is Chomah, 
rrcnrr. The two are used together in Josh. ii. 15, “ her house was upon 
the town-wall, and she dwelt upon the wall.” Here Chomah is rendered 
“ town-wall” and “wall,” while Kir, which, in the original, comes before 
Chomah, is not translated. The meaning, however, is clear—that the walls of 
the town formed also the back wall of the house. Thus Zunz, “ ihr Haus 
war in der Wand der Stadtmauer , und in der Stadtmauer wohnte sie.” 

As a proper name, Kir seems to have had the signification of citadel, and is 
so used: 

1. In Isai. xv. 1, “ Kir of Moab,” now called Kerak, possibly the Fortress of Moab, as 
Ar-moab, or Kabbah, was the Capital. 

2. The same place, under the names of Kir-charaseth, 1 Kir-Chareseth, Kir-charesh, 
and Kir-cheres, is mentioned in 2 Kings iii. 25 ; Isai. xvi. 7, 11 ; Jer. xlviii. 31, 36. 

3. Kir is also the name of a place or district in Assyria. 2 Kings xvi. 9 ; Isai. xxii. 6; 
Amos i. 5 ; ix. 7. 


§ 82 . 

KIRI AH, or KIRJATH, JTpp, Chald. anp ; from rnp, to build (see Gesenius in 
voce, p. 1236): apparently the ancient, and thence, in later times, the poetical 
word for ‘ city.’ See, among others, Num. xxi. 28, “ city of Sihon.” Ps. 
xlviii. 2, “ the city of the great. Bang.” Isai. xxv. 2, “of a defenced city” 
We have seen that Ir and Ar are only seldom used in proper names, whereas 
Kirjath is a frequent name for the towns of Palestine. 2 

On the other hand, it is hardly ever used as a general'noun in prose. 
The only exceptions worth noticing are: Deut. ii. 36; iii 4, in the quasi- 
proverbial expression, “there was not one city left:” 1 Kings i. 41, 45, in the 
conversation of Adonijah and his friends about the uproar in Jerusalem: and 
Ezra iv. 10, in speaking of Samaria; and 12, 13, 15, 16, 19, 21, in the letter 
of the Samaritans describing Jerusalem; implying that the word was at that 
time used only as a Samaritanism. 

The cities in the name of which the word occurs are the following. It 
will be observed, that in every case they existed before Palestine was taken by 
the Israelites. 

1. Kirjath, a town of Benjamin. Josh, xviii. 28. Possibly Kirjath-jearim. 

LXX Alex. tt6\ls lapi/n. 


1 Compare the use of the word castle in 
Chester, Newcastle, Doncaster, &c. 

2 Kirjath is probably the word represented 
by the Latin Carthago, and it appears as 


a Phoenician word in Sicilian coins (see 
Gesenius voce rnp, p. 1237), and in names 
like Cirta, Tigrano-Certa, &c. 







512 


APPENDIX. 


2. Kirjathaim (‘the double city’), (a) a town of Moab, on the.east of Jordan. 

Gen. xiv. 5; Num. xxxii. 37 ; Jer. xlviii. 1, &c. It is spelt in the 
A. V. Kiriathaim : LXX, Kapiadd/x. (b) A town in Naphtali, allotted to the 
Gershonites, 1 Chr. vi. 76. In the parallel list in Josh. xxi. the name is 
contracted to Kartan—as En-gannim to Anem. 1 LXX, Kapiadatfi. 

3. Kirjath-arba, “the city of Arba, the father of Anak,” (= Hebron), Gen. xxiii. 2; 

Josh. xiv. 15, &c. It had retained its old name after the captivity, 
Neh. xi. 25. 

4. Kirjath-huzoth (‘the city of Streets’), Num. xxii. 39 ; els n6\eis iiravXewv. 

5. Kirjath-jeanm (‘city of Forests’), on the borders of Judah and Benjamin, 

originally Gibeonite, Josh. ix. 17; xv. 60; tt6\is lapip.. Called also 
Baal ah, Baale, and 

6. Kirjath-arim, Ezra ii. 25, (1 Esdr. v. 19, Kiriathiarius) ; and in addition, 

7 . Kirjath-baal, Josh, xviii. 14 ; icapiadfiaaA. 

8. Kirjath-sepher, ‘the city of the book,’ tt6\is ypap.fj.dTai/, a Canaanite town in 

the mountains of Judah, Josh. xv. 15 ; Judg. i. 11 ; called also, 

9. Kirjath-sannah, ‘the city of the Palm,’ Josh. xv. 49. After its capture by 

Caleb it took the name of Debir. 

The word also appears in a slightly different form in 

10. Kerioth, (‘cities’) (a) a town in the south of Judah, Josh. xv. 25; LXX, 

KapluO , and hence probably Iscariot: (5), a place in Moab, Jerem. xlviii. 
24, 41 ; also Amos ii. 2, where the word is spelt Kirioth. 

11. Kartah, nrnp, a town of Zebulun, allotted to the Merarites, Josh. xxi. 34 ; Kapda. 


§ 83 . 

BIRAH, TTY'S, ‘ palace ; ’ i.e. a royal house or fortress: either from the Hebrew 
abirah, strong, or the Persian baru, a wall or fortress; Sanscrit 
bura, Greek t rvpyos ; German Burg; English Bury. In Persian names of 
places it frequently occurs, as Perso-6ora, Esto -bara, &c. (See Gesenius, 
s.v. p. 204.) 

It is used chiefly in the Chaldaic books of the Old Testament; where, with 
two exceptions, it is the epithet of Shushan, the royal residence of the Persian 
kings. See Ezr. vi. 2 ; Neh. i. 1; Esth. i. 2 ; ii. 3 ; iii. 15; viii. 14 ; ix. 6, 
&c.; Dan. viii. 2. The exceptions are Neh. ii. 8, and vii. 2, where it is used 
by Nehemiah to designate the citadel attached to the Temple at Jerusalem. 
In 1 Chron. xxix. 1, 19, it means the Temple. In the plural, Biranioth, the 
word occurs only in 2 Chron. xvii. 12; xxvii. 4, where it is rendered 
“ castles.” 

In the LXX Birah is rendered by oIkos, butobopi), mostly by tt6ais, and occa¬ 
sionally by fiapis. It is also often treated as a proper name, and given as 
*Afifielppa , and v B eipa, or Blpa. Bap is was probably introduced from its likeness 
of sound to the Hebrew word, as fiupbs was for Bamah, a high place; Kidapa 
for Kitharos, a harp; aydirq for ahabah , love, yv for Gai a ravine, and many 
others. In Egypt it was the word for the state barges of the Nile, and hence 
its adoption for a great house or palace was not unnatural. Jerome, on 
Psalm xiv. 10, says that fidpis was a word peculiar to Palestine, and used even 
in his time for houses closed round on every side and built like towers; and 
the Scholiast, on Psalm cxxii. 7, that it was the provincial word in Syria 
for large houses. In Josephus’ time it was applied to the tower of Antonia 
(Antiq. XV., xi. 4). 


1 Compare the well-known contractions in the names of English towns, as Brighton, for 
Brighthelmston. 




APPENDIX. 


513 


§ 84 . 

All MONT, 'pft'IS, ‘keep’ of a palace: from on*, to be high, the root of Pyramid, 
and of Hermon, ‘the lofty peak.’ 1 2 (See Gesenius, s. v., p. 152.) A word 
almost exclusively used in the poetical books, e.g. Psalm xlviii. 3, 13; Isaiah 
xxv. 2 ; Jer. xvii. 27 ; Amos, i. 4 ; ii. 2, &c. In the historical books it occurs 
only^three times: 1 Kings, xvi. 18, and 2 Kings, xv. 25, “the palace of the 
king’s house ; ” possibly a keep or strong tower overlooking the rest of the 
palace. Ewald (Geschichte, 2nd edit., iii. 451, 602,) suggests that it was the 
Harem, the most securely guarded portion of Eastern houses. In 2 Chron. 
xxxvi. 19, the word is used for the “ palaces ” of Jerusalem. In the LXX it is 
very variously rendered; e.g. Bd pis, irvpy6fiapis, to?xos, x&P^ (probably 

reading ns™ for pnna) and OefieAiov. In the two passages from Kings it is 

(1) forpov, possibly a corruption from &p,uu>v, (see Frankel, Yorstudien, p. 65,) 
and (2) ivavriov, probably a further corruption of dvrpov. 

By Aquila and Symmachus it is occasionally rendered jSetpay, (Amos, i. 12; 
ii. 5.) See § 83. 

In one passage, Amos iv. 3, the word occurs with a slight change of form, 
as Ilar’mon, 


§ 85 . 

CHATZER, an enclosure ; from to surround: hence used for a “ court” 

or vestibule, as of the Tabernacle (Exod. xxvii. 9, &c.) or Temple (1 Kings, vi. 
36 ; 2 Kings xxi. 5,) or of a palace, (2 Kings, xx. 4 ; Esther, i. 5 ; Jer. xxxvi, 
20, comp. 22,) or prison, (Neh. iii. 25 ; Jer. xxxii. 2, &c.,) or even of a house, 
(2 Sam. xvii. 18). Topographically, however, it is a ‘village;’ generally a 
Bedouin village, Gen. xxv. 16 (LXX, ckwH)) Isaiah, xlii. 11 ; such as are 
formed of tent-cloths, spread over stone walls. In such “ Hazerim,” “ dwelt ” 
the Avim or Avites, who seem to have pushed their way from the Desert as far 
as Gaza, and who were destroyed by the ; Philistines from Caphtor (Deut. ii. 23)-. 

In the LXX the usual renderings are avA-f], answering to “ court;” and 
and eirav\is, indiscriminately to “ village :” it is also rendered olula, 68os, e£<!8pa, 
iru\7j, aKyv'fi, and, strangely, nAovaios in Ps. x. 8 (LXX, ix. 29). 

The following are the places in the names of which Chatzer (Hazer) is used. 
One of them, Hazeroth, is in the Desert itself, (see Chap. I. p. 81,) and it will 
be observed that the others are all on the Bedouin frontiers of the country. 

1. Hazeroth, ’Affrjpc&d. Numb. xi. 35 ; xii. 16 ; xxxiii. 17, 18. 

2. Hazar-addar, eiravAis ’ Apd8 , a place on the south boundary of Palestine, 

Numb, xxxiv. 4. In Joshua xv. 3, the name is contracted to Adar. 

3. Hazar-enan, ‘village of springs.’ A place in the north of Palestine, near 

Hamath, Numb, xxxiv. 9, 10 ; apaeuaiu, Ezek. xlvii. 17 ; xlviii. 1, rj avA^i 

rod Alvav, and rod AlAaju. 

4. Hazar-gaddah, ‘village of fortune.’ One of the “uttermost cities of Judah 

toward the coast of Edom southward Josh. xv. 27. 

5. Ilazar-hat-ticon, ‘the middle village,’ auAy) rod ’Zavvav, “ by the coast of 

Hauran,” on the north-west of Palestine ; Ezek. xlvii. 16. 

6. Ilazar-shual, ‘village of the fox’ (see Chap. III. p. 162 note). A place in 

the very south of Judah, near H. gaddah : xoAa<rea>Aa, apcrwAa, iaepcrovdA. 

Josh. xv. 28; xix. 3 ; 1 Chron. iv. 28; Neh. xi. 27. 

7. Ilazar-susah, or susim, ‘village of horses:’ a place belonging to Simeon, also 


1 See Chap. XII. p. 395. become curiously corrupted in the LXX to 

2 The word Hazerim in this passage has : Alex, dcr-qpud. 


L L 




514 


APPENDIX. 


in the extreme south. Josh. xix. 5; 1 Chron. iv. 31 ; crapaovalv, 
7}fu<Tov(rw<rtU' 

A slightly different form of the word is Chatzor (Hazor) “iten, which occurs 
as follows:— 

(1.) Josh. xi. 1 ; xii. 19 ; Judges iv. 2 ; 1 Sam. xii. 9. 

(2.) Josh. xv. 23, 25. 1 (3.) Josh. xix. 36. 

(4.) Neh, xi. 33, (5.) 2 Sam. xiii. 23 (Baal-hazor), 


§ 86 . 

CHAYVAH, rm, plur. Chawoth (Eng. Yers. Ilauoth), nun, 1 a tent-village; ’ from 

run, life; 2 (whence Eye— Heb. Chavah—“the mother of all living.”) The 
Bedouins of the present day use the same word for their own villages. Chawoth 
is solely employed in the Bible for those taken from Gilead by Jair the sou oi 
Manasseh, and which to a late period retained the name of Chawoth-Jair. 
See Chap. YIII. p. 321. 

Numb, xxxii. 41, “ small towns,” iiravKeis. 

Dent. iii. 14, “Havotli,” QavwO ; Alex. AvdoQ. 

Josh. xiii. 30, “towns,” Kci/xas. 

Judg. x. 4, “Havoth” ( Margin , Villages), iiravKeis. 

1 Kings iv. 13, “towns ;” Vat. omit.; Alex. AvdO, 

1 Chron. ii, 23, “towns,” Kwpas. 


§ 87 . 

CAPHAB, or C°ph er > a ‘hamlet:’ from "C|>, to cover. 
tectum. It occurs in 


Compare 


1 Sam. vi. 18, Kcti/xr) . . "1 

1 Chron. xxvii. 25, i-rroucla > 
Cant. vii. 11, K(t>/j.rj . . J 


in each 
“ villages,” 


See also Chephar-haammonai, ‘ the hamlet of the Ammonites,’ Josh, xviii. 24; 
and Chephirah, one of the towns of the Hivites, Josh. ix. 17, also Caphar- 
Salama, 1 Macc. vii. 31. 


The application of the word to Caper-naum shows that it indicated a regular village 
or town, Kci/xr), and not a mere collection of hovels or tents like Chatzer. In the 

N. T. ir6\is and tcdi/iri 3 correspond to Kir and Caphar; but their use is indistinct. 
Thus Caper-naum, which by its name—and Nain, which by its situation—could hardly 
have been more than villages, are called ttoAis, as is also Nazareth (Luke ii. 4, 39); 
whilst Bethsaida, probably the flourishing town of Bethsaida Julias, is called kco/at). In 
this case, however, it is possible that, as the old name of Bethsaida, prevailed in popular 
language, against the modern Julias, so also did its ancient appellation of kc6/«j 4 continue. 


1 “And Hazor, Hadattali, and Kerioth : 
[and] Hezron, which is Hazor,” are more 
correctly ‘and Chatzor-Chadattah (i.e. New 
Chatzor) and Kerioth-Chezron, which is 
Chatzor.’ 

2 Compare the common use of the word ‘ to 
live’ in English, for ‘to dwell.’ 

3 K d>fi7j is in the Vulgate rendered castel- 


lum in John xi. 1, which in later Latin came 
to mean what is now expressed by its deri¬ 
vative, castle. Hence the European Pilgrims 
in Palestine looked, at Bethany, not for the 
village , but for the Castle of Lazarus. 

4 In the same manner the name Hamlet is 
still retained by theTo-wer-ffamlets of London, 
now a district containing many thousand 



APPENDIX. 


515 


Josephus (Antiq. xviii, ii. 1 ) expressly contrasts the two, icupriv Se ByOcraidav . . . 
TrdAeu? irapacrxuv a^'iwfia . . . ’IouAia . . . 6p.uiuvp.ov e/caAeo'ev. Probably it was what 
in Mark i. 38, is called kw/xottoAis, a village grown into a city. Bethlehem is in Luke 
ii. 4, tt6Ais\ in Johnvii. 42, iccip. 77 . 

A large number of places with names compounded of Caphar are mentioned in the 
Talmuds, and in the Onomasticons of Eusebius and Jerome. See Iteland, 684—693. 
Amongst these is Caphar-Saba, the original name of Antipatris. See Chapter YI. p. 271. 


§ 88 . 

TIRAH, rnnp, a Bedouin castle: like Chatzer from a root signifying to surround, 
y ®—(see Gesenius, p. 548). It is a word of only occasional use, and occurring 
in the historical books in reference to the strongholds of the nomad tribes, as 
follows:—Gen. xxv. 16; Num. xxxi. 10, “castles,” iiravAeis. 

See also—Ezek. xxy. 4 , “ palaces,” aicrjuri, 


§ 89 . 

P^RAZOTH, riirjQ, Perazon, jins, orPerazi, T£, ‘ unwalled towns’ or ‘villages,’ 
in contradistinction to walled or fenced cities: from ns to separate or open 
(see Gen, xxxviii. 29.) The exact signification of the word is given in Deut. 
iii. 5; 1 Sam. vi. 18; Esther ix. 19; Ezek. xxxviii. 11. It is also found in 
Judg. v. 7, 11 , 1 and in Zech. ii. 4. Hence Perizzites ; i.e., the inhabitants of 
open villages,—the Pagani or peasantry,—as distinguished from the Canaanites, 
or those who dwelt in the Phoenician cities; Gen. xiii. 7 ; xxxiv. 30; Judg. i. 4. 
Probably they inhabited the hills above the plain of Sharon; see Josh. xi. 3 ; 
xvii. 14—18. 


90 . 


BAITH (E.Y. Beth), 1*1)2, ‘house ;’ probably from n», to build (as 5<fyios, domus, 
from Semico),—the most general expression for a fixed habitation, whether tent or 
building; usually the latter, though sometimes for a tent, as in 2 Kings xxiii. 
7 ,—“ the women wove hangings (D'm = houses; i.e., tents ) for the grove ” 2 of 
Astarte: (comp. Job. viii. 14, where it is used for a spider’s web.) See also 
Gen. xxvii. 15 ; Judg. xviii. 31 ; 1 Sam. i. 7, &c. That the primitive notion 
was of a dwelling appears from the form of the letter which is called from it, 
both in the old and modern forms of Hebrew, and more especially in the 
Ethiopic alphabet. 


§ 91 . 

soc, it'd, or Sucah, HSD, Plur. Succoth, rfi2D, ‘ booth or covert: ’ from TpD, to 
cover as with boughs. Always a habitation of man or beast made of leafy boughs. 
The “Feast of Tabernacles,” so called, was celebrated in such huts, and is 


inhabitants, and returning two members to fortes in Israel. (See Gesenius, sub voce , 
Parliament. p. 1125.) 

1 In these two places, as well as in Habak. 2 This passage is curiously corrupt in the 
iii. 14, the word translated “villages” should Vatican LX X : ov at yuvaiKes vcpaiuov e/cet 
be rendered ‘the chiefs,’— olSvmroi. Vulg., Xerntp. (Hittites) t<£ &\<r«. 

L l 2 




.516 


APPENDIX. 


always designated by this word, thus showing that it did not commemorate the 
tents of the wilderness, but probably the ‘ booths’ of the first start—(Succoth, 
Lev. xxiii. 43 ; Exod. xiii. 20), the point of transition between the settled 
and the nomadic life. So the word is used in Gen. xxxi. 17, in the life of 
Jacob. 

“ Succoth” in this connection with the feast is invariably in the English 
Bible, “tabernacles.” In the LXX the word used is constantly the feast 
being kopr'q tuv <tkt)vuv. Yulg. tabernaculuni , tentorium , umbraeulum. 

The words used for the sacred “ Tabernacle” worship are Mishcan , jstio, and 
Ohel, the former signifying the frame-work and interior part of the con¬ 
struction ; the latter, the outer covering of the tent. Space will not permit of 
these words being analysed. 

In the following passages, this word is used for the retreat of the Hon : Job xxxviii. 
40, “covert;” Psalm x. 9, “den;” Jerem. xxv. 38, “covert;” and hence, in Psalm 
lxxvi. 2, for Jerusalem, the lair of the Lion of Judah. In 2 Sam. xi. 11, “tents ;” 
1 Kings xx. 12, 16, 1 —“pavilions”—it is applied to military huts ; while in Job xxxvi. 
29,—“tabernacle”—2 Sam. xxii. 12, and Psalm xviii. 11,—“pavilions, ”—it is the 
poetical expression for coverings of clouds. 

The following are the remaining instances of its use : Lev. xxiii. 42, 43 ; Neh. viii. 
14, 15, 16,17; Job xxvii. 18, “booths;” Ps. xxxi. 20, “pavilion;” Is. i. 8, 
“cottage;” iv. 6, “tabernacle;” Jonah iv. 5, “booth.” 


§ 92 . 

MIY^TZAR, 1 fortress: ’ from "ix v n, to render inaccessible. The word 

commonly used with vs>, and rendered “ fenced city; ” see Numb, xxxii. 17, 3G; 
Josh. x. 20, xix. 35; 1 Sam. vi. 18; 2 Kings iii. 19; x. 2; xvii. 9, xviii. 8; 
2 Cliron. xvii. 19. In 2 Kings viii. 12, and Numb. xiii. 19, it is rendered 
“ strong-holds.” It is twice applied to Tyre; in Josh. xix. 29, and 2 Sam. 
xxiv. 7. In the poetical books, the word is frequently used, as Ps. lxxxix. 40; 
Isai. xvii. 3; Jer. i. 8; Nahum iii. 12; and is rendered by our translators 
“ fortress,” and “ defenced city.” 

From the same root is also derived Bitztzaron, ]i'“)522, which is only 
used in Zech. ix. 12, and there rendered “strong-hold.” 


§ 93 . 

MAOZ, a ‘ strong-hold: ’ from TO, to be firm. Used in Judg. vi. 26, and 

there translated “rock,” elsewhere always employed in the poetical books— 
as Ps. xxvii. 1—strength. Dan. xi. 7, 19, “fort; ” 10, “ fortress.” It is applied 
by Isaiah to Tyre, “ the strength or strong-hold of the sea,” xxiii. 4, 11, 14 ; 
and in xxx. 2, 3, to “ the strength of Pharaoh,” and by Ezekiel—xxx. 15— 
to Sin (Pelusium), “ the strength of Egypt.” 


§ 94 . 

MAON, ]i37p, and M’ONAH, a dwelling-place or ‘ den, ’ as of wild beasts: 

from to rest or fly for refuge.’ Used of lions, Job xxxviii. 40 ; Psalm civ. 
22; Cant. iv. 8; Nahum ii. 11, 12; Amos iii. 4; and of other beasts, Job 


1 An instance of the strange inconsistency we read iv (jkt)vcus —‘in tents’—but in verse 
of the present text of the LXX. In verse 12 16 iv 'Xokx^G — in Succoth. 




APPENDIX. 


517 


xxx'vn. 8; Jer. ix. 11; x.22; xlix. 33; li. 37. Of tlie dwelling-place of 
Jeho'van at Shiloh, 1 Sam. ii. 29, 32 ; and at Jerusalem and Zion, Psalm xxvi. 
8; lxvui. 5; with the image of a lion, Psalm lxxvi. 2, “in Salem is his 
leafy covert, and his ‘den* in Zion” (to KaroiKTjT'fipiov avrov), See Chap III 
p. 170. ' 1 


§ 95 . 

M TZAD, and M’TZOODAH, rnfnsp, ‘a lair’ (as of wild beasts) or ‘fast¬ 
ness: ’ from to to hunt or lay snares. The original meaning is seen from its 
use in Jer. xlviii. 41; Job xxxix. 28; and Ezek. xvii. 20, where the imagery 
is of birds of prey. Topographically it is applied to the hill forts of Judaea 
(1) generally, in 


Judges vi. 2. 

1 Sam. xxii. 4, 5. 

xxiii. 14, 19, 29. 

xxiv. 22. 

2 Sam. xxiii. 14. 

1 Chron. xi. 16, xii. 8, 16. 
Ezek. xxxiii. 27. 


“strongholds” 
“the hold” 

“ strongholds ” 

“the hold” 
“an hold” 
“the hold” 
“the forts” 


TO Kp(:fXa<TTa. 

rrj irepioxv- 

iv tois arevoTs and iv Mecaapa 
iv 7 ots arevoTs. 1 
els r)]v M eairepa (TTev-qv. 
rrj Trepioxf). 

Trj Trepioxf) and fior)6eiav. 
Tereixurp-evcus. 


And (2) specially to the citadel of Zion: 


2 Sam. v. 7. 

9. . 

17. . 

1 Chron. xi. 5, 7. 

16. 


“the stronghold 
“the fort” 
“the hold” 
“the castle” 
“the hold” 


LXX T) Trepioxv . 


Besides the above, the word is frequently used in the poetical books, often 
in connection with Sela and Tzur, and is variously rendered “munitions,” 
“ fortress,” and “ defence.” In the case of Isaiah xxxiii. 16, the LXX 
rendering of the word led to the tradition of the Cave of the Nativity at 
Bethlehem. See Chap. XIV. p. 435. 


§ 96 . 

HATZOIt, Tfett, and M’TZOORAH, rq-lSp, ‘ fort: ’ from (the root also of Tzur) 

to bind together. Used alone (2 Chron. xi. 10), and with Ir (§73) to express the 
fortified towns of Judah and Benjamin, in 2 Chron. viii. 5; xi. 5, 10, 11, 23 ; 
xii. 4; xiv. 6,—passages in which it is variously rendered “fenced,” “for 
defence,” “ fenced cities,” and “strongholds.” Once applied to Tyre, Zech. 
ix. 3. Also used in poetical passages for the offensive works of a siege, and 
rendered, “siege,” “bulwarks,” and “forts;” see Deut. xx. 19, 20; xxviii. 
53, &c.; Isai. xxix. 3; Nah. iii. 14. 

The similar word "teo, occurring in 2 Kings xix. 24; Isai. xxxvii. 25; 
and xix. 6, with Jor (§ 36) is, as has been pointed out in that place, probably to 
be translated Egypt (Mitzraim). 


1 This is a good example of a frequent 
cause of corruption in the Septuagint text. 
The iv rots arevols is a marginal gloss or ex¬ 
planation of M ecirapd, which is in itself a 


(corrupt) literal rendering of the original 
Hebrew word. The gloss was in time taken 
into the text where it now stands side by side 
with the word it was intended to explain. 






518 


APPENDIX. 


§ 97 . 

MIS , TAR, IJpPp, hiding-place : from m to cover or hide. Used in the poetical 
hooks only; (1) of the lurking-places of lions, Ps. xvii. 12; Lament, iii. 10: 
and of violent men, Ps. x. 8, 9; lxiv. 4; Hab. iii. 14 ; (2) of a shelter, Isai. iv. 6; 
and (3) concealment, Jer. xiii, 17; xxiii. 24; xlix. 10. The English rendering 
is “ secret place,” and (once) “ covert.” See § 23, 7c. 

§ 98 . 

M^OORAH, n*pSd, aperture: strictly a place by which light is admitted to an 
interior chamber; from to enlighten. Occurs but once—in Isai. xi. 8, where 
it apparently means the crevice leading to the nest of the adder, LXX, koitt}. 
It has, however, been conjectured to mean the sparkling eyes, or the glittering 
crest, of the snake itself (see Gesenius, s.v. p. 56). 


VIII.—THE SEA AND ITS SHOEES. 


§ 99 . 

JAM, dj, “ the sea ”—derivation unknown, but applied to all large pieces of water. 

1. With the article—“Ha-Jam”—it is the Mediterranean, Josh. xv. 47; also called 

“ the great sea,” Num. xxxiv. 6, 7; the “hinder,” or “ western sea,” Deut. 
xi. 24. From this application it is used for “the west,” even in speaking of 
countries where the situation of the Mediterranean is not in the west, as of 
Egypt (Exod. x. 19), Arabia (Exod. xxvii. 13, xxxviii. 12). 

2. “The sea of ‘weeds,’ ” for the two branches of the Red Sea. See Chapter I. p. 6. 

3. “The sea of Chinnereth,” for the Sea of Galilee, Num. xxxiv. 11, Comp. Isa. ix. 1. 

4. The “salt sea,” Gen. xiv. 3; “sea of the ‘desert,’” Deut. iv. 49; “eastern 

sea,” Josh. ii. 20 ; Zac. xiv. 8, for the Dead Sea. 

5 . Great rivers, as the Nile. Jer. xix. 5; Nah. iii. 8.; Ezek. xxxii. 2 (so the 

Arabian Bahr), the Euphrates, Isa. xxvii. 1 ; Jer. li. 26. 

It is also applied to the laver in the Temple, 1 Kings, xxv. 18; 1 Chron. 
xviii. 8. 

It is always translated “sea” in the A.V. except when used for “west.” 


§ 100 . 

CHOPS ?)in, “sea-shore,” from to wash away—Gen. xlix. 13, “ haven; ” 
Deut. i. 7, “ side; ” Josh. ix. 1, “coasts;” Jud. v. 17, “shore;” naftdMos, 
littus maris. For the words for the banks of a river, see § 35. 


§ 101 . 

MIPHTlATZ, bay, from ps, to break, Jud. v. 17. Translated “breaches.” 

See Chapter YI. p. 261. 


APPENDIX. 


519 


§ 102 . 

MACIiOZ, VinD, “haven.” Ps. cvii. 30. 

The following are the words used for the waves of the sea. 

GAL, plur. Gallim (literally heap). See, amongst others, Job. xxxviii. 11; 
Ps. lxv. 7; Isa. xlviii. IS ; Ezek. xxvi. 3 ; Zach. x. 11, all “ waves ; ” Ps. xlii. 
7, “billows.” 

DACI, *OT, only in Ps. xciii. 3, “waves.” 

MISH^BAE '“Qtpp, (metaphorically for the waves of trouble) see 2 Sam. xxii. 5 ; 
Ps. xlii. 7, “waves;” Jon. ii. 3, “billows.” 

BAMAH, a high place, is used only in Job ix. 8, for the ridges of the 

waves of the sea. 


ERRATA, &c. 


Page 78, line 14, for “covered” read “crowned.” 

,, 97, (notes), read as follows :— 

3 Judith v. 14. 4 Deut. xxxiii. 2. 

,, 108, (map), for “ Chebah,” read “Chebar.” 

,, 158, (map), the names in red indicate the doubtful sites, the names in black the 
certain sites, “Boad to Jericho,” and “Hoad to Bethlehem,” should 
be in black. 

“ 197, last line. The relative positions of the Wady Kelt, the Wady Fowar, and the 
Wady Suweinit, as represented on the map, are not in exact con¬ 
formity with the statement in the text. But, in the uncertainty 
which attaches to the details of this portion of topography, I venture 
to leave the inconsistency, in the hope that it may be finally rectified 
by the forthcoming map of Mr. Van de Yelde. 

,, 224, (map), correct the positions of the references (2) and (3) by the note to p. 237 

,, 401, line 11, for “Crysorrhoas,” read “ Chrysorrhoas.” 

,, 430, (map), transpose the references (2) and (3) in the left hand column. 


Chapter XII., Notes A. and B. I take this opportunity of referring the reader for 
all that concerns the Traditions of Damascus, to Mr. Porter’s “ Five Years at 
Damascus,” which has appeared since my own chapter on that subject has been 
printed. I refer particularly to his remarks on the sceue of St. Paul’s Conver¬ 
sion, (i. 43), and his discovery of the unquestionable Homan remains of the 
Straight Street, (i. 48). 


In the references to the Erdkimde of Professor C. Bitter throughout this work, the 
following names have been adopted for the volumes relating to Sinai and 
Palestine:—Part XIY. (or Yol. I.) is designated Sinai: Part XV. (Vol. II.), 
Sect. 1. Jordan: Sect. 2. Syria: Part XVI. (Yol. III.) Palestine: Part XVII. 
(Yol. IV.), Sect 1. Lebanon: Sect. 2. Damascus. 





INDEX. 


*** The following abbreviations are employed in the Index .*—Pul. Palestine ; 
M. Mountain ; B.. River; L. Lake ; IN. North ; S. South ; E. East; 
W. West; 0. T. Old Testament; N. T. New Testament; A. V. Authorised 
Version of the Bible; Words preceded by f —as fAbel —are Hebrew 
topographical terms, which ivill be found at large in the Appendix; 
Arabic names are put in Italics. 


Aaron : his death on Mount Hor, 87 : 
“Hill of A.,” 30, 43. 

Abana, It. (Baradd), 110. 

Abarim, M., 292. 

Abel: legendary site of his death, 405. 

+Abel (meadow), 485. 

Abel-beth-maachah, 382 note. 

Abel-Shittim, 292. 

Abila, 292 note. 

Abila (capital of Abilene), 405. 

Abimelech : his conspiracy at Shcchem, 235. 

Abou-Simbel, xlvi. 

Abou-zennab : grave of horse of, 69. 

Aboutig-Suleman: rock of, 80. 

Abraham : in Egypt, xxviii., lii. ; his wells 
at Beersheba, 22, 146 ; oaks of, 103, 
140, 141 ; view of Sodom, 130 ; and of 
Moriah, 130, 248; “Abraham’s house,” ! 
at Hebron, 142 ; and tomb, 148 ; his 
meeting withMelchizedek, 246 ; sacrifice 
of Isaac, 247 ; pursuit of Chedorlaomer, 
282, 404. 

Absalom : his death, 143. 

Acacia (Shittim), 21, 69, 292, 335 note. 

Accho (sandy) : modern Acre, 260 ; the only 
Bay of Pal., 113 ; key of Pal., its many 
sieges, 260, 261. 

Achan : cairn over, 119 note. 

fAcliu (reeds), 485. 

Adullam : its locality, 254 note. 


Adummim : Pass of, probably scene of Good 
Samaritan, 416; meaning of word, 416 
note. 

iEnon (springs), 305. 

fAgam (pond), 503. 

Agricultural plains of Palestine, 134. 

Ahijah, the Shilonite : tomb of, 228 note. 

Ai : battle of, 198; meaning of word, 199 
note; possibly Tel-et-Hajar , 200; three 
towns so called, 119 note. 

+Ain (spring), 146, 500. 

Ain-el-Weibeh: not Kadesh, 94, 96. 

Ain Fasael, 299 note. 

Ain Jdhlood , 334 note. 

Ain Sultan, 300 note. 

Ajalon (stags) : valley of, 162 note, 204. 

Ajeidld, 30, 65. 

! AJcaba (defile), town of, 10, 84, 99. 

Akaba, gulf of: see Gulf of A. 

Aksa: see El-Aksa. 

fAllon (oak), 140, note 508. 

Allon-backuth (oak of tears), 142 note, 217, 
222 . 

Amalekites : their ancient power, 28 ; on 
S. of Pal., 132, 160, 165 ; incursions 
into Pal., 135, 333; “ Mountain of A.,” 
233 note. 

Amanus, M., 109. 

+Ammah (elbow), Hill of, 489. 

Amorites (mountaineers), 132. 







522 


INDEX. 


Anathotli, 210. 

“Andromeda, Rocks of,” 270. 

Anemones of Pal., 100, 137. 

Animal worship of Egypt, xxviii. ; xlix. 

Annunciation, Church of the, at Nazareth, 
437 : see Spring of A. 

Anti-Lebanon, 110; villages and gardens of, 
135 ; trees of, 138 note. 

Antioch, described by Mr. Fremantle, 400. 

Antipatris, 271. 

Antonia tower, 179. 

+Aphik (body of water), 498. 

Apocryphal Gospels : contrast with the ca¬ 
nonical, 409 ; real source of earliest local 
traditions, 409, 434 ; their record of the 
Nativity, 434 note; and of the Annuncia¬ 
tion, 438. 

Apostles, the : their connexion with Caesarea, 
and the Plain of Sharon, 258. 

fArabah : its meaning in the Bible, 279 note, 
288 note , 292 note, 481. 

“ Arabah, the,” 5, 84 ; its slope from E. to 
W., 85; apparently “Wilderness of 
Zin,” 93. 

Arad, 160 and note, 161. 

Aram (Syria) : meaning of, 128. 

Aram-naharaim (Mesopotamia), 128 note. 

Aram of Damascus : A. Zobah, A. Maachah, 
A. beth-Rehob, 128 note. 

Araunah’s threshing-floor, 246 ; according 
to Professor Willis, the Sakrah, 179. 

Ard-el-Hamma, 360. 

tAremon (keep of a palace), 513. 

Ar-Gerizim, 246. See Gerizim. 

Ariel (lion of God), 170. 

Arimathea : derived from Ramathaim, 220. 

Ar-Mageddon, Plain of Esdraelon : derivation 
of the word, 246, 330. 

fArootz, 492. 

Arsuf, 270. 

Asaf: see Lasaf. 

Ascalon, 253 : the prophetical curse od, 
268. 

“Ascension;” summit of Olivet, 183. 

Ascension, Church of the, on Olivet: an¬ 
tiquity of site, 447; probably does not 
commemorate the Ascension, which took 
place at Bethany, 448. 

Ascent to Pal. from the Desert, 102, 129. 

Ashdoth-Pisgah, 292 note, 499. 

Asher : obscurity of, 261; richness of his 
possession, 354. 

fAshrah (“grove”), 509. 

Assyria : first invasion of Pal. by, 282. 

Astarte : groves of, 143, 389, 509. 

AttdJca: see Gebel A. 

Aulay, R. (Bostrenus), 264. 

Aven (naught), 219 note. See Bethaven. 

Avim, or Avites^ (dwellers in ruins), 120 
note* 


| Ayoun Mourn (wells of Moses), 58, 66. 
Aznoth-Tabor, 488. 

Azubah : Hebr. word for deserted town, 119 
note. 


Baalbec, 399. 

Baal-tamar, 145. 

Balaam : his view of Israel, 130, 293, 315. 

fBamah (wave), 518. 

Banias, 389. 

Baptism : of John, 306 ; spread of the rite 
of Baptism, 307. 

Baradci, R. (Abana or Pharpar) : its course, 
110, 276, 281, 401 ; vegetation on its 
banks, 401; Pass and Br. of Sliukk B., 
405. 

Basalt: of Sinai, 81 ; of Bashan, 382. 

Bashan, 316 ; oaks of, 143, 317 ; cattle of, 
318, 382 ; “ Mountain of B.,” Anti- 
libanus, 114 note. 

BcUihah, plain of, 364. 

Beatitudes : see Mt. of B. 

Bedouin characteristics of the Trans-Jordanic 
Tribes, 319, 320; of Jephthah, 321; 
Elijah, 321, 348; and John the Bap¬ 
tist, 305. 

Bedouins: permanence of their habits, 24, 
32 note, 69 ; their incursions into Pales¬ 
tine, 135. 

fBeer, a well, as contradistinguished from a 
spring, 146, 502. 

Beeroth (El Bireh), 210. 

Beersheba : wells of, 22, 146, 159, 161. 

Beit JDejan, 252. 

Beit LiJchi, 204. 

Beit Nuba, 204 ; encampment of Richard I., 
209. 

Beit Sireh, 204. 

Beit-ur el-tathi (Beth-horon the Upper), 204. 

Beit-ur el-foJca (Beth-horon the Nether), 204. 

+Beka or Bikah, Hebrew word for Plain, 384, 
478. 

Behaa: see El B. 

Bela (Zoar), traditional meaning of, 283. 

Belus, R., 328, 496. 

Beni-Hassan, tombs of, on the Nile, xxxiii. ' 

Benjamin : early alliance with Ephraim and 
Manasseh, 195, 225 ; importance of the 
Passes and Heights of, 196. 

tBerecah, a pool, 502. 

Bestin: see Gebel B. 

fBeth or Baith (house), 515. 

Beth-abara (house of ford), 304 ; doubtful 
reading of the word, 335. 

Bethany (bouse of dates) : origin of name, 
144, 184 ; roads from B. to Jerus., 
167, 187 ; described, 186 ; now El 
Lazarieh, 23 note, 186 ; home of Christ 
and scene of the Ascension, 191, 448. 





INDEX. 


523 


Betkaven (house of naught) : Bethel, 201, 
219 ; LXX reading of, 219 note. 

Bethel (house of God): oak of, 142 ; Palm 
tree of Deborah at, 145 ; Forest of, 
121, 201, 303 ; excavations round, 
147 ; view from, of Abraham and Lot, 
129, 214 ; halting-place of Abraham, 
214 ; and of Jacob, 216 ; its unimpres¬ 
sive situation, 154; analogy with Jerus., 
218 ; importance to northern kingdom, 
217, 218 ; in direct thoroughfare of 
Pal., 213; Schools of Prophets at, 219. 

Beth-hac-Cerem (house of the vine), 163 note. 

Beth-horon (house of caves); upper and nether, 
204 ; Battle of, 206, 208. 

Beth-horon: LXX. reading of B.-aven in 
1 Sam. xiii. 5, 219 note. 

Betk-jeshimoth (house of the wastes), 292 
note. 

Beth-lehem (house of bread), type of a 
Judsean village, 163 ; cultivation at, 
137 ; Rachel’s sepulchre, 147 ; Church 
of Nativity at, 140, 432 ; Grotto of 
Nativity, 151, 433. 

Beth-marcaboth (house of chariots), 160. 

Beth-phage (house of figs), 184 note, 414. 

Beth-saida (house of fish) : origin of name, 
367 note ; the Eastern B., 374, 514. 

Beth-shan ( Beisan ), 333, 338. 

Bethulia, perhaps Sanur, 244. 

Birah (palace), 512. 

Birds of Gennesareth, 419, 422 ; of Egypt, 
xxxiii. 

Bir-el-Khebir (well of the chief), 209. 

fBittzaron, stronghold, 516. 

Blanche-garde : possibly Libnah, 253. 

Bologna : Ch. of St. Stephen at, illustrating 
the House of Loretto, 444. 

+Bor, a cistern or pit, 504. 

Bostrenus, R. ( Aulay ), 110 note, 264. 

Bowring : his report on Syria, 120 note. 

Bozez (shining) : crag at Michmask, 201. 

Burial-places : absence of regard for, amongst 
the Jews, 149, 296. 

Butm: Terebinth, 140. 


Cabul: district given by Solomon to Hiram, 
356. 

Caesarea: built by Herod, 257; why the 
capital of Roman Palestine, 259. 

Caesarea-Philippi: its varied associations, 389; 
northernmost point of our Lord’s journey- 
ings, 391, 411. 

Caimo, Bernardino : his “Palestina” at Va- 
rallo, 444. 

Caipha, 113, 261 ; ancient Sycaminopolis, 
145. 

Cairo : view from, xxx. ; old Cairo or Fostat, 
xxx., 302 note . 


Cairns, monumental: of the Jews, 119 note. 
Caleb : his family and portion, 161, 164. 
Callirhoe : warm spring on shore of Dead 
Sea, 289. 

Calvary : meaning of, 454 note. 

Cambyses : in Egypt, xxxvii. ; his death at 
Ecbatana, 345. 

Cana : doubtful site of, 359. 

Canaan (the Lowland), 263. 

Canaanites, 132, 134 ; their chariots, 133, 
384. 

Candlestick : lighted at F. of Tabernacles, 
420. 

Capernaum : various sites conjectured for, 
376 note; known in the 4th cent., 377. 
tCaphar (hamlet), 514. 

Caphar-Saba : ancient name of Antipatris, 
271, 515. 

fCarmel: promontoi-y of, 259, 260 ; its abun¬ 
dance of wood, 344 ; ‘‘The Park” of 
Pal., 344; Convent of, 345 ; scene of 
Elijah’s sacrifice, 347 ; meaning of word, 
483. 

Carmel, iuS. of Judah, 100, 479, 484. 
Casius, M., 109. 

Castle of Penitent Thief, 203. See Ladroon. 
'fCataph (shoulder of a mountain), 195 note, 
488. 

Cataracts of the Nile : the first, xlii. ; the 
second, 1. 

Catherine St. See Gebel Katherin. 

Caverns : of Pal. generally, 150, 200, 505 ; 
of Judasa, 162 ; not used for worship in 
early times, 151 ; but in modern times 
selected for sacred localities, 151, 435; 
Caves of Hermits, 152 ; of Carmel, 345 ; 
of Paneas, 391 ; of Elijah at Sinai, 49. 
Cedars: confined to Lebanon, 139, 396; 

reverence for them, 139. 

Cephas, 492. 
fCephim (rocks), 492. 
fCeroth (wells), 504. 

Cestius : defeated at Beth-horon, 209. 
Chariots of Canaanites, 133, 384. 

Chariot roads of Pal. 134. 
fChatzer (enclosure or village), 513. 
+Chawah (tent village), 514. 

Chebar, R. : vegetation on, 122. 
tChebel (district), 487. 

Chedorlaomer, 282, 289. 
tCkelkali (plot), 486. 

Cherith, Br., 496; possibly Wady Kelt, 
299. 

Chinnereth: name of Sea of Galilee in O. T., 
365. 

TChisloth (loins, of a mountain), 488. 
Chittim (Cyprus), 116, 294 note, 398. 
fChoph (sea shore), 518. 
tChor (hole), 505. 
tChoresh (wood), 506. 








524 


INDEX. 


Christian Year, The : Illustrations of Sinai, 
23; of Palestine, 116, 139, 293; of 
Gennesareth, 363, 364 note', of Jeru¬ 
salem, 467 note. 

Chrysorrhoas, R., 401. 

fCiccar, 278 note, 323 note, 355, 482. 

“City of David” (Zion), 176, 189. 

Cities : of Judah on hill tops, 163, 329 ; of 
Samaria in valleys, 329 ; of Philistia, 
and of Esdraelon on slopes, 329 ; of 
Phoenicia, 262. 

Cleopatra, li., 303. 

Coele-Syria, 399. 

Coenaculum, the, on Mt. Zion, 450. 

Colossal statues in Egypt: at Thebes, xxxv. ; 
at Ipsambul, xlvii. ; at Old Memphis, lii. 

Colours of the Rocks of the Desert, 11, 12, 
71 ; of Petra, 88, 91. 

Constantine : his Basilica at Jerus., 179, 455; 
abolished worship of Abraham’s oak, 
142. 

Conversion of St. Paul: reputed site of, 403. 

Copts : their chapel at the H. Sepulchre, 460. 

Coral of the Red Sea, 83. 

Corn-fields of Philistia : their importance, 
134, 254 ; of Jacob’s settlement at 
Shechem, 229. 

“Corruption, Mt. of:” probably the Viri 
Galilaei, 185 note. 

Crocodiles in Egypt, xxxv.; River of in Sharon 
(Moi Tcmsah), 271 note. 

Crusaders, 360, 361, 398, 443 ; their view 
of the Sakrah, 178. 

Crusades, 262, 266, 431. 

Cypresses of Lebanon, 139 note. 

Cyprus (Chittim), visible from Lebanon, 115, 
398 ; signification in Balaam’s vision, 
294 note. 


Dagon, 252. 

Damascus : situation of, 402 ; legend of 
Mahomet’s view over, 131, 215, 402; 
localities of, 403. 

Dan, tribe of: link between Philistines and 
Israel, 254; mention of, in the blessing 
of Jacob and of Moses, 388. 

Dan, city, 387. 

David : tomb of, 147 ; his flight up Olivet, 
185 ; and into Gilead, 322; lamentation 
for Jonathan, 338. 

David, city of (Zion), 176, 189. 

Dead Sea : difference of depth at N. and S., 
283 ; level of surface, 284 ; saltness, 

286 ; and desolation, 287 ; island in, 

287 ; in Ezekiel’s vision, 288 ; contrast 
with Gennesareth, 366. 

Debbet-er-Jlamleh: sandy strip between the 
Tih and the Tor, 8. 

Debir, 161. 


i Deborah : palm of, 145 ; oak of, 217, 222 ; 
song of, 320, 331. 

Dcir (convent), the, probably the sanctuary of 
Petra, 97, 98. 

Delphi: its impressiveness, 154; and deso¬ 
lation, 192. 

Demoniac of Gadara, 372; why not mentioned 
by St. John, 411. 

Dendera, li. 

Derceto (fish goddess), 252. 

Dervishes, 305. 

Dio-Csesarea (< Sepphoris ), 357. 

Dog River (. Nahr-el-Kelb ), 117, 264. 

Dogs at Jezreel, 342. 

Dor ( Tentura), 256. See Naphath-Dor. 

Dothain, Dothan ( Dotan ), 244. 

Doves, the Sacred, of Yenus, 253. 

Di-uses : their yearly sacrifice on Carmel, 
346, 347 note. 

DiVnj, M. (“Little Hermon”), 328. 

D&lc (Docus): stream by Jericho, 300. 


Ebal, M. (Imacl-el- Deen) : derivation of the 
name, 233 note. 

Ecbatana : village below Carmel, 345. 

Egypt’s connexion with Israel, xxvii., xxviii., 
495. 

Egyptian hieroglyphics on the rocks of Sinai, 
25, 70. 

Ehud, 227. 

El-Aazy, R. (Leontes), 275 note. 

El-Alcsa, dome of, 189. 

fElah (terebinth), 22 note, 140, 507 ; valley 
of, 203, 477. 

Elath, or Eloth (trees): the modern ATcabci, 
22, 84, 508. 

El-Birch (Beeroth), 210. 

Elevation of the whole country of Pal., 102. 
127. 

El-Haram Ali ibn Aleim, 270. 

El-Hessue , 71. 

Elijah, 219, 271, 303, 305, 345 ; his Bedouin 
characteristics, 321, 348 ; his sacrifice 
on Carmel, 345, 347, 498. 

“ Elijah’s melons,” 153. 

Elim, springs of, 21, 22, 37, 68, 508. 

Elisha, 244, 303. 

El-Jib (Gibeon), 212. 

El-Kda (sandy plain betwixt Sinai and the 
sea), 9, 10. 

El-Khuclr (the Prophet Elijah), 272, 402 note. 

El-Lazarieh (modem name of Bethany), 23 
note , 186. 

El-MaharraJcah (the burnt sacrifice): on 
Carmel, 346. 

Elton (Salt-lake of Asia), 286 note. 

fEmek (valley), 476. 

En : see Ain. 

En-eglaim (spring of calves), Callirhoe, 289. 






INDEX. 


525 


En-gannim (spring of gardens), 342. 

En-gedi (spring of kid), 144, 289,500. 

Epliraim : tribe of, dominant for 400 years, 
225 ; mountains of, 227. 

Ephraim, Forest of, 322. 

“Ephraim, the city called:” Ophrah and 
Tayibeh, 210. 

Er-Rarn (Ramah of Benjamin), 210 ; one of 
the supposed sites of Hamah of Samuel, 
221 . 

Esdraelon: plain of, 327 ; peculiarity in 
situation of its villages, 329 ; battles of, 
330, 361 ; battle-field of Pal., 329, 
349; on the thoroughfare of Pal., 340, 
349. 

Eslicol (cluster), valley of, 162. 

+Eshed, 499. See Ashcloth. 

+Eshel : Tamarisk, 22 note, 509. 

Essenes, 290, 305. 

Etam, the cliff, 254 note , 255. 

+Etz (tree), 507. 

Euphrates : “ The River,” 494 ; allusion to, 
in Balaam’s prophecy, 293. 

“ Evil Counsel, Mount of,” 183. 

Ewald : on the Wanderings of Israel, 25 ; 
the cave of Elijah, 49 note ; Amorites, 
132 note ; Jebus, 176 note ; Abimelech, 
236 note: Gilgal, 302 note ; Ahimaaz’ 
running, 323 note ; Mt. Gilead, 324 
note : See also the notes to 227, 228, 
320, 359, 388, and Appendix passim. 

Ezekiel’s vision of a river issuing from Jerus., 
130, 180, 288 ; representation of Tyre 
as a ship, 266. 

Ezion-geber, 84 note, 507. 


Falaise, tannery at, 269. 

Fastnesses of Judab, 162. 

Feirdn. See Wady F. 

Fenced cities of Judah, 163. 

Fergusson, James : his opinion on the Sakrah, 
179, 454 note ; on Zion, 170 note , 172 
note ; on site of Church of the Sepulchre, 
454 note. 

Feshkah, 294 note. 

“Field, the” : of Shechem, 232, 244 ; of the 
Vale of Siddim, 281; of Moab, 292, 
315. 

Figtrees : on Olivet, 144, 184 ; parable of, 
413, 414. See Bethphage. 

Fish : abundance of, in Gennesareth, 367, 
369 ; Joshua’s law concerning, 367 ; 
none in the Dead Sea, 286 note. 

Flowers : in the south of Pal., 100, 104 ; 
profusion of scarlet, 137 ; contrast of 
their colours, 138 ; “lilies,” 422. 

Fords of Jordan, 297, 304, 320, 322. 

Forests of Pal., 121, 137, 301, 314 note, 
322, 354. 


Fortifications of Jerusalem, 181. 

“Frank mountain Herodion, 163 ; accord¬ 
ing to Gesenius, site of Rarnah of Samuel, 
221 ; Gebel el Furcidis, 507. 

Frederick Barbarossa : buried at Tyre, 265. 
Friday : legendary origin of its sacredness to 
Mussulmans, 207 note. 

Fureia: see Gebel F. 

Fureidis: see Gebel el F. 


Gad: a pastoral tribe, 319; but warlike, 
320. 

Gadara, tombs at, 373. 

Gadites, their passage of the Jordan, 297, 
298. 

fGai (ravine), 477. 

+Gal (cairn), 119 note, 199 note ; also spring, 
502 ; and wave, 519. 

Galilsean dialect, 356 note. 

Galilee : origin of word, 355 ; hills of, 356 ; 
torrents of, 422 : chief scene of the 
History of the Three Gospels, 410 ; 
Parables of which G. is the scene—the 
sower, 418; corn, 418 ; “tares,” 419; 
architectural use of the word, 356. 

Galilee, Sea of: see Gennesareth. 

“Galilee,” or “ Viri Galilsei” : one of the 
summits of Olivet, 183 ; possibly the 
Mt. of Corruption of Solomon, 185 note. 

Gardens of the East (N. T. &ypoi), 187 
note ; in valleys of Sinai, 27, 52. 

Gazelles of Palestine, 204, 324. 

+Geb (ditch), 504. 

Geba ( Jeba), 210 ; confounded with Gibeah, 
210 note, 489. 

Gebel AttdTca (M. of deliverance), 30, 65. 

Gebel Attar ous: according to Burckhardt, 
Pisgah, 295 note. 

Gebel Bestin (St. Episteme) or G. ed Deir, 

77. 

Gebel ed Deir (M. of the Convent) : at Sinai, 
46 ; ascent of, 77. 

Gebel el Bandt (M. of the Damsels), 31, 80. 

Gebel el Fureidis (Little Paradise), “the 
Frank Mountain,” 163 : see Jebel F. 

Gebel et Tur (Olivet), 183. 

Gebel Fureia: above W&dy er Raheh, 35. 

Gebel Hdroun (M. Hor) : proofs of its iden¬ 
tity, 87 note, 90. 

Gebel Katherin (M. St. Catherine) : why so 
called, 32, 45, 76 ; ascent of, 76 ; visible 
from G. ed Deir, 78 ; and from the Pass 
of El-Wah, 79. 

Gebel MoJcatteb (M. of writing), 60. 

Gebel Mousa (M. of Moses) : traditional site 
of Sinai, 39—44 ; ascent of, 74; colours, 
12 ; springs and vegetation on, 19, 20 ; 
valleys of, 27, 42; mysterious noises 
heard on, 14, 23; Mussulman legend of, 






526 


INDEX. 


58 ; visible from G. ed Deir, 78 ; and 
from el-Wall, 79 : no inscriptions, 60. 

Gebel Shebibeh, in the Arabah, 85. 

Gebel Solab (M. of the cross) Gr. ed Deir, 77. 

Gedor, 159 note. 

fGedoth (banks of a river), 494. 

Gehenna, 170 note. 

Ge-Hinnom (Ravine of H.), 171, 477. 

Geliloth, 278 note, 288 note, 483. 

Gennesareth, Lake of: view of from Tabor, 
361; described, 362; depression of, 
and climate, 362 ; beach, 363, 370; 
vegetation, 363 ; has no associations 
with the 0. T. 364, 381; Jewish belief , 
that Messiah would rise from it, 365 ; ; 
called Chinnereth in the 0. T. 365 ; j 
copious springs on W. shore, 366; re- ' 
calls the Yalley of the Nile, 366 ; 1 
contrast with Dead Sea, 366 ; abundance j 
of fish, 367, 369, 420 ; eastern shore, j 
372 ; traditional localities of the lake, 
378 note; derivation of name, 366 I 
note. 

Gennesareth, Plain of: ancient activity in, 
368 ; its dense population, 368 note, 
369, 375 ; contrast with the surrounding 
desert, 371; compared to Yale of Siddim, j 
366, 377 ; scene of the Sower and other ! 
Parables, 418 ; birds of, 419, 422. 

Geological features : of Syria, 4 ; of Sinai— 
limestone 7, sandstone 8, granite 10 : 
of Palestine, 145, 149, 153. 

Gerar, valley of, 159. 

Gerizi, or Gerizites (1 Sam. xxvii. 8), 233 
note, 246. 

Gerizim M. : probable scene of Abraham’s 
meeting with Melchizedek, 234, 246, 
247 ; address of Jotham from, 236; 
still the sanctuary of the Samaritans, | 
236. 

Gethsemane : traditional site of, 450. 

Ghazaleh : see Wady G. 

Ghor, the (Jordan valley), 277, 285 note, 481. 

Ghurundel : see Wady G. 

fGibeali (a hill), 41, 301 note, 489; comp, j 
213 note. 

Gibeah of Saul {Tel-el-FuLU), 210, 213. 

Gibeon (El-Jib), 212 ; high place of Gibeon, | 
Nebi Samuel, 212. 

Gideon, 225, 243, 334, 336. 

Gilboa, M., 328; bare hills of, 329 ; battle ; 
of, 322, 330, 337 ; spring on, 334; j 
possibly alluded to in Judg. vii. 3, 
334 note. 

Gilead (heap of witness), 317; mountains of, 1 
3i4. 

Gilgal, 301 : its successive history, 302; ! 
mention o^ with Gerizim, 235 note ; 
possibly two places of the name, 303 
note. 


Gischala : birth-place of St. Paul, according 
to Jerome, 197 note. 

Golan, 381. 

fGoommatz (pit), 505. 

Goshen (frontier), in Egypt, xxviii., xxix., 
xxxiv., and on S. of Pal., 159. 

Gospels : differences between the first three 
and the fourth, 410, 411; Apocryphal 
Gospels, 409, 434, 438. 

Granite of Sinai, 10, 12. 

Greece : change of climate through loss of 
wood, 121 ; connexion of its locality 
with its history, xiii. 

Greek and Roman names in Pal., 229, 260, 
271, 374. 

Grottoes : selection of, for the sacred locali¬ 
ties of Pal., 151, 435 ; Grotto of Na¬ 
tivity, 151, 433 ; of Ascension on Oli¬ 
vet, 151, 447 ; of Annunciation, 437. 

Groves of Astarte, 143, 389, 509. 

Guadalquivir, R. : derivation of name, 16. 

Guides, Arab, of Sinai, xxii., 31 note, 42, 73, 
77, 85 note. 

GulfofAkaba, 5, 83, 84; level of, 285. 

fGulloth (bubblings), 502. 


Hadad-Rimmon, 339. 

Uadjar Alouin, 319. 

“ Hamath : entering in of,” 399. 

Hammath, 365. 

Haram-es-Shenf (The Noble Sanctuary), 
i.e., the Mosque of Omar, 168. 

Hareth : forest of, 121. 

Harod (trembling) : spring of, 334 note. 

Hasbeya, R., 386, 387. 

Hattin : battle of, 340, 361. See also Homs 
of H. 

Havoth-Jair, 321 note, 514. See Chawah. 

Hazar-susim (Yillage of Horses), 160. 

Hazer (Tent Yillage) : frequent occurrence of 
the name in S. of Pal. 160. See Chatzer. 

Hazor : city of Jabin, on Merom, 383; its 
remains, 389; grove of Astarte there, 
143, 389. 

Hazazon-tamar (Felling of Palm), i.e., En- 
gedi, 143, 289. 

Hebron: earliest city of Pal., 164; vineyards 
of, 162 ; approach to, 100; pools of, 
102, 503 ; Mosque of, 101, 148. 

Helena : her church at Bethlehem, 433 ; 
and on Olivet, 447. 

Heliopolis (On), xxxi., xlviii. 

Herder : on Mt. Tabor, 343; on tribe of Dan, 
388. 

Hereford Cathedral : medieval map there, 
116 note. 

Hermon, Mt., 110, 311, 386 : its various 
names, 395. 

Herod the Great : his buildings at Jerus., 





INDEX. 527 


181; founder of Caesarea, 257; resi¬ 
dence at Jericho, 303; illness, 289 ; 
burial-place, 163. 

Herod Agrippa : his death, 258. 

Herod Antipas : his buildings at Tiberias, 
367. 

Hervey, Lord A., 331 note. 

Hieromax, R. ( Sheriat-el-Mandhur ), 278 
note , 290, 297 note. 

“Hill country” of Judaea, 161. 

Hiram, 139 note, 356 note. 

Hobah, 404. 

Holy Places : their interest, 431; list of the 
chief, 432. 

Holy Sepulchre, the : scope of the arguments 
for and against the traditional site of, 
178, 452 ; diversity of its architecture, 
455 ; and its worship, 456, 459 ; scene 
at Easter, 459—464; possible origin 
of these rites, 464. 

tHor or Har (Mountain), 41, 487. 

Hor : see Mount H. 

Horeb : meaning of, 31; special use of the 
word, 31 note. 

Horites, 22 note, 506. 

“Horns of Hattin,” M., 328, 360. 

Htileh , L. (Merom), 382 : name as old as 
the Crusades, 383 note. 

Hyaenas : see Zeboim. 

Hyssop, 23 note, 70, 81. See Lasaf. 


Iim, or Ije-abarim, 120 note. 

Iim, in S. of Judah, 120 note. 

Iniad-el-Deen (Ebal), 233 note. 

Infantry : strength of Israelite armies, 133. 
’fir or Ar (city), 510. 

Ipsambul, xlvi., xlvii. 

Ish-bosheth, 322. 

Issachar : territory of, and sluggish charac¬ 
ter of the tribe, 340, 354. 

Issus: bay of, 109. 


+Jaar (forest), 507. 

Jabbok, R., 290. 

Jabesh-Gilead, 339. 

Jabin, KingofHazor, 331. 

Jacob, 175 : in Egypt, xxviii., his first settle¬ 
ment in Pal., 232; his caution, 238,147. 
Jacob’s Well, 146,237, 420. 

“ Jacob’s Tears,” 154, 244 note. 

+Jad, side of a river, 494. 

Jaffa (Joppa), 240 note, 253, 257; perhaps 
originally Philistine, 252. 

Jair, 321, 514. 

fjam (the sea, and the west), 116, 518. 
fJarden (Jordan), 496. 

Jasher, Book of, 206. 

Jeba (Geba), 210. - 


Jebus: siege and capture of, 171: possibly 
Zion, the “ upper city,” 176. 

Jebel-el-Fureiclis : i.e., the Frank Mountain, 
221, 507. See Gebel-el-F. 

Jehoshaphat: valley of, 172. 

Jehu : his attack on Ahaziali, 341. 

Jenin (En-gannim), 342 note. 

tJeor : special name of the Nile, 495. 

Jephthah, 321. 

f Jerecataim, ‘ ‘ flanks ” of a mountain, 489. 

Jeremiah : his lament over K. Josiah, 340. 

Jericho : key of Palestine, 299 ; numerous 
streams near, 300 ; palms at, 301 ; re¬ 
built, 302. 

Jeroboam : his temple at Beth-el, 218, 219. 

Jerome: his residence at Bethlehem, 105, 
436 ; on Ebal and Gerizim, 234 note ; 
on Adummim, 416 note ; on the en¬ 
campment by the Red Sea, 34 note ; on 
Kadesh, 94 note ; and on Mt. Hor, 95 
note. 

Jerusalam ; possible origin of the dual ter¬ 
mination, 176 note. 

Jerusalem : great elevation of site, 127; first 
aspect disappointing, 165; constant view 
of mountains of Moab, 105, 166, 295 ; 
compared in situation to Luxembourg, 
166; ravines round, 166, 170,171,172, 
476, 477 ; grandeur of approach from 
Jericho, 167; continued possession of it 
by the Jebusites, 169; emphatically a 
mountain city, 169 ; lair of the Lion of 
Judah, 170, 516, 517; compactness of, 
172 ; in what manner the mountains 
“stand round” it, 173 ; natural capital 
of Pal., 175 ; its position on the frontier 
of Judah and Benj., 175, 195 ; double 
nature of the city, 176 ; siege by Titus, 
177 ; spring beneath the Temple, 179 ; 
has never overstepped its walls, 180 ; 
walls built by Sultan Selim I., 181 ; 
its ancient palaces, 182 ; present 
ruinous appearance, 182; prophetical 
denunciations of, 268 ; tannery at, 269 ; 
Holy Places of, 445 ; Church of As¬ 
cension, 446 ; tomb of Virgin, 449 ; 
Gethsemane, 450 ; Coenaculum, 450 ; 
Holy Sepulchre, 451. 

i'Jeshimon (waste), 482. 

Jezreel : valley of, 328, 334 ; spring of, 334, 
337 ; park and palace of, 341; visible 
from Carmel, 347, 349. 

i Job, Book of: 280 note, 486 note, 496. 

■ John, St. : the scenes of his gospel chiefly in 
Judsea, 410. 

j John the Baptist: tomb at Sebastieh, 242 ; 
scene of his preaching, 304 ; his out¬ 
ward aspect, 306. 

Jonathan: his victory over the Philistines, 

201 , 210 . 





528 


INDEX. 


1-Jooval (floodstream), 498. 

Joppa, 113 : derivation of name, 240 note ; 
St. Peter at, 258, 269. 

Jordan (Descender), the : origin of the name, 
278 ; extraordinary general character, 
111 ; influence on the H. Land, 111, 
113 ; rapid descent and tortuous course, 
276, 277 ; terraces, 290 ; desert plain, 
291 ; jungle on banks, 278, 291, 298 ; 
passage of, by Joshua, 297 ; fords of, 
304, 322, 335 ; baptism of John, 307 ; 
bathing of the Pilgrims, 308—310 ; the 
Jordan between Gennesareth and He¬ 
roin, 364 note; lower source at Tel-cl- 
Kadi , 386; upper source at L’anias, 390. 

Joseph, in Egypt, xxviii., xxxi., xxxii., 
xxxiv., xli., xlviii., lii. ; at Dothan r 
244. 

“ Joseph’s tomb” in the vale of Shecliem, 
147, 237 note. 

Joseph, Count of Tiberias, 377. 

Josephus on the route of the Israelites, 34, 
36, 66 note ; on Horeb, 39 ; on the 
Rock of Moses, 47 ; on identity of Ka- 
desh and Petra, 95 ; his account of 
Hoses’ death, 295; on Galilee, 355 note ; 
Gennesareth, 366, 368 note, 376 ; on 
Bethsaida, 515. 

Joshua : his capture of Ai, 198 ; the battle 
of Bethhoron, 205—208 ; battle with 
Jabin, 383; legendary “tomb of Joshua” 
at head of L. Merom, 385 note ; law 
respecting fish in Gennesareth, 367. 

Joshua, book of: importance for geography 
of Pal., xi, 

Josiah : his battle with Pharaoh Necho, and 
death, 117, 339. 

Judsea : table-land of, 173 ; hills of, 161. 

Judah : character of tribe, 161. 

Judas, traditional tree of, 105 note, 183. 

Judas Maccabseus: battle at Beth-horon, 
209. 

Judith, book of, 243, 247. 

Justinian : builder of Convent of St. Cathe¬ 
rine, 52. 


Kda: see El-K&a. 

Kadesh (holy), 93, 98 : encampment of the 
Israelites at, 94 ; identical with Petra, 
95; its dignity in the Hebrew traditions, 
97 ; supposed by Robinson to be Ain-el- 
Weibeh , 99. 

Kadesh-barnea, 93 note: distinguished by 
Jerome from K. en-Mishpat, 94 note. 
Kadisha (holy) : stream of Phoenicia, 264. 
Kal at - cs-Skuhif (Belfort), 397 note. 

Kanah (reed), stream, 256. 

Ivarnac, xxxviii. 

Keble : see Christian Year. 


Kedesh-Naphtali, 332, 357, 382. 

Kedron (black) : ravine of, 171, 189, 290 ; 

in Ezekiel’s vision, 2S8. 

Kenites : 160, 161, 289 note, 294, 332. 
Kerak ofMoab, 166, 511. 

Khan Jusuf, 244 note. 

Khan Minyeh , 376. 

Khasimeyeh (boundary) R., 272, 398. 
Khassab (reedy), inner part of plain of Sha¬ 
ron, 255. 

Ivinah, 160 note. 

+Kir (wall), 511. 
fKirjath (city), 511. 

Kirjath-jearim (city of forests), 121, 507, 
512. 

Kirjath-sannah (city of palm), 161. 
Kirjath-sephir (city of book), 161. 

Kishon, R., 328. 

Kubbet-en-Nasar, 402 note. 


“Ladder of the Tyrians” (Ras NaJchora), 
260, 262. 

Ladroon, i. e. Castellum boni Latronia, 203 

Lahai-roi : well of, 159. 

Lasaf, or Asaf (caper plant), 22, 70, 81. 

fLaslion (tongue or bay), 494. 

Latin monks : their superiority to Greek, 
346 ; impressiveness of their service at 
Nazareth, 437. 

Lebanon : the “lions’ dens” in, 162 note ; 
meaning of the name, 395 ; source of 
imagery to Hebrew poetry, 396 ; view 
from, 397; traditions of, 404. 

Lebaoth (lionesses), 162 note. 

Legends of Pal. : their slight connexion with 
the localities, 154, 446. 

Leontes, R. (Litany) : not an ancient name, 
110 note , 398 ; largest river of Syria, 
264 ; its course, 275; and rise, 399. 

Leopardi: his connexion with the story of 
Loretto, 442 note. 

Libnah (white), 203 note, '509. 

“Lily” of Palestine, 138, 422. 

Limestone : of Syria generally, 4 ; of Sinai, 
7 ; of Palestine, 145, 301, 382 ; at 
Adummim, 416 note. 

“Lion of Judah,” 161, 170. 

Lionesses : see Lebaoth. 

Lions : in mountains of Judah, 161 note. 

Litany R. (Leontes), 110, £98. 

“Little Hermon” (Dfihy), 328. 

Lo-debar, 480 note. 

Loretto, House of : its flight from Nazareth, 
439 ; daily devotions at, 440 ; exami¬ 
nation of the legend, 441 ; its probable 
origin, 443. 

Lot: his view from Bethel, 214, 215. 

Luxembourg : compared in site to Jerusalem, 
166. 





INDEX. 


529 


Luz (almond): ancient city on site of Bethel, 
214, 217, 509. 

Lycus (wolf) : river of Phoenicia, 264. 
Lydda, 258. 


+Maaleh (ascent), 492. 

+Maan (place watered by springs), 501. 
tMaareh (open field), 486. 
tMabbool (the deluge), 499. 
f Mabbooa (gushing spring), 502. 

Maccabaeus : see Judas M. 

Machpelah : cave of, 147, 150. 

Magdala, 375. 

Mahanaim (two hosts), 322. 

Mahomet: legends of his visit to Sinai, 54 ; 
flight to Jerusalem, 148, 178 ; view over 
Damascus, 131, 215. 

Maimonides : buried at Tiberias, 364. 

Makkedah, 207. 

fMakor (well-spring), 502. 

Mamre : oak of, 103, 141. 

Manasseh : the tribe, 320, 381. 

Manna, 22, 28 note. 

+Maon (den), 170 note, 516. 

+Maoz (stronghold), 516. 

Mashchith (corruption) : Talmudic name 
for Obvet, 185 note. 

Matterhorn (Alp) : derives its name from the 
meadows below, like the mountains of 
Sinai, 18 note. 

+Matzor (fort), 517. 

Maundrell, 233. 
tMearah (cave), 505. 

Medinet-chai: traditional name of Mukmas, 
200 note. 

Medjel , 376 note. 

Megiddo : plain of, 328, 339 ; waters of, 
331; battle of, 339. 

Melchizedek, 234, 246, 247. 

Memphis, li. lii. 

Meonenim (enchantments) : oak or tere¬ 
binth of, 141 note , 236 note , 508. 
Merom, lake of : (called also Samachon, and 
now HlUeh), 382. 
fMetzad (lair), 170 note, 517. 

■fMetzoolah (bottom), 478. 
fMical (brook), 498. 

Michmash: battle of, 199 ; root of word, 200 
note. 

fMidbar (wilderness), 23, 480. 

Midianites : their incursion, 333. 

Migdal-el: probably Magdala, 375 note. 
Migron (precipice), near Michmash, 202 note 
Milman, Dean, xxii. 166, 177. 

■fMiphratz (bay), 518. 

+Misgab (lofty rock), 492. 

'f'Mishor (downs% name of trans-Jordanic 
territory, 317, 337 note , 479. 
tMivtzar (fortress), 516. 


Mizpeh (watch-tower): probably Scopus, 222 

Moab : mountains of, 104, 105, 166, 174, 
314 ; vineyards of, 413. 

Modin, 163. 

Moi Temsah (Crocodile R.), 271 note. 

Moladah : well of, in S. of Judah, 159. 

Monte Rosa : Arabic names of the adjacent 
valleys, 16 note. 

Mont-joye (Nebi Samuel), 131, 211. 

Moore : his report on population of Syria, 
120 note. 

tMorad (descent), 493. 

Moreh : oak of, 141 ; or terebinths of, 232, 
234, 248, 508. 

Moriah (vision) M., 176 and note , 178, 248. 

Moses : in Egypt, xxxii. xlii. xlviii, lii. ; his 
view from, Pisgah, 130, 294, 315 ; his 
death, 295; and burial-place, 296; 
Wells of M. on the Red Sea, 29, 58, 
66; Rock of M., 46, 47. 

Mosque of Omar, 167. 

fMotza (spring-head), 501. 

Mount of Beatitudes, 360 : view of, from 
W&dy Hymam, 875, 422 note; of 
Safed from, 421. 

Mount of Precipitation, 358, 359, 437. 

Mountains : security over plains, 135, 227 ; 
highest mountains named from their 
snowy tops, 395 note. 

Mountains of Galilee : their beauty and rich¬ 
ness, 353. 

Mountains of Sinai : the T6r, 9 ; their 
geology, 10 ; main groups, 12 ; colours, 
12, 70; complication of summits, 13, 

74; desolate grandeur, 13, 20; still¬ 
ness, 14; called after the W&dys, 15 ; 
other names due to some natural pecu¬ 
liarity, 18, 31. 

Mountain views of Pal. : from Gerizim, 234 ; 
Gilead, 315 ; Nazareth, 357 ; Lebanon, 
397 ; of Damascus from A.-Libanus, 
402. 

Mount Hor ( Gebel Hantn) : first view of, 
86 ; proofs of its identity, 87 ; visible 
from the Devr, 98: see also 487. 

Mount of Olives: its elevation, 174 ; its 
four summits, 183 ; “The Park” of 
Jerusalem, 184 ; Rabbinical legend of 
the dwelling of Shechinah on, 186 ; 
Remarkable view of Jerusalem from, 188. 
See Olivet. 

Mountjoy : see Mont-joye. 

MUTcmas (Michmash) : traditions of, 200 note 

Mussulman legends: puerility of many, 
148 ; of Moses, 32, 57, 58 ; of Jethro, 
34 ; of Rock of Sakrah, 178 ; battle of 
Beth-horon, 207 note ; of Peter’s vision, 
269; of Elijah, 271; of Christ’s de¬ 
scent at Damascus, 403 note; of Abel, 
Seth, and Noah, 405, 406 ; of a light in 


XI M 









530 


INDEX. 


their chapels on Friday nights, 272, 406, 
465. 

Mustard tree, 419 note. 

Myrtles, at foot of Olivet, 144 note, 121. 


NabJc (Thorn), 363, 418. 

Nablous (Neapolis, Shechem), 229. 

+Nachal (wddy, or torrent-bed), 15, 496. 

fNahar (perennial river), 493. 

Nahar-Mukatta (R. of Slaughter), the Ki- 
shon, 347 note. 

Nahr-el-Kelb (Lycus), the Dog River, 117 

Nain, 349, 359. 

Nalcb-HOwy (pass of the wind), 73. 

NdMs, M. (bell), 10, 14. 

■fNaphath and N.-Dor, 256, 486. 

Naphtali, 354 ; possession of the S. of Gali¬ 
lee, 355, 365. 

Nativity : church of, at Bethlehem, 432 ; 
common to the three sects ; remnant 
of the Basilica built by Helena, 433, 
and last repaired by Edward IV., 140, 
433 ; Grotto of Nativity, 433 ; antiquity 
of the tradition, 434, 436 ; its origin, 
435 ; objections to its identity, 435. 

Nazareth : situation, 357 ; ancient reputa¬ 
tion of, 358 ; sacred localities of, 359 ; 
taken in 1291 by Sultan Khalil, 443. 

Nazareth : Franciscan Ch. of Annunciation 
at, 437; Greek Ch., 438; legend of 
the flight of the Virgin’s house to Lo- 
retto, 439 ; house at Nazareth com¬ 
pared with that at Loretto, 430, 441. 

Nebi-Mousa (Tomb of Moses), 296 note. 

Nebi-Samuel , 137, 165 ; view of Jerusalem 
from, 183, 204; described, 210, 211 ; 
has been supposed to be Mizpeh, 211; 
but is probably the High Place of Gibe- 
on, 212 ; according to Muss, tradition, 
Ramah, 221. 

Nebi-Zur or Nabi-Z ., 272. 

Nehemiah, 181. 

New Forest : Tabor compared to, 343. 

Nile: in Delta, xxx. ; valley of, xxxii. ; 
colour of, xxxii. ; at Silsilis, xlii. ; at 
Cataracts, xlii., 1. ; in Nubia, xlv. ; 
vegetation along, xxxiii., li. ; 122 ; 

palms at Memphis, 1. ; 301 ; valley of, 
recalled by Gennesareth, 366. See Jeor, 
and Shichor. 

Noah : tomb of, in Lebanon, 406. 

Nob : possibly on the V. Galilsei summit of 
Olivet, 185 note. 

Nubia, xlvi. 


Oaks of Palestine (El, Elah), 140, 508 ; oak 
of Mamre, 103, 140, 141 ; of Moreh, 
141 ; of Meonenim, 141 note ; of Bethel, 


or of Deborah (Allon-bachuth), 142 ; 
of Zaanaim (wanderers), 142, 322 note, 
355 note; of Bashan, 143, 317, 323 ; 
at Tel-el-Kadi, 386 ; at Hazor, 389. 

Oak timber from England, used in roof of 
Ch. of Nativity at Bethlehem, 140. 

“Offence, Mount of:” on Olivet, 183, 185 
note. 

Oleanders : probable allusion to, in Ps. i., 
145; at Gennesareth, 363 ; on Upper 
Jordan, 385 ; on the Orontes, 400. 

Olivet ( G.ebel-et-Tur) : origin of word, 183 
note; Rabbinical traditions of, 186; 
formerly abundant in vegetation, 121, 
184 ; view of Jerusalem from, 130 ; 
probably scene of Parables of Last Judg- 
ment and of Good Shepherd, 415 ; olive 
trees now existing on, 450. See Mt. of 
Olives. 

Olive trees of Pal., 138 : on the traditional 
site of Gethsemane, 450. 

Open space before the gates of East, cities, 
338, 342. 

+Ophel (mound), 303 note, 490. 

Ophrah ( Tayibeh ): the "city called Ephraim,” 
210 . 

Oreb (raven), 333. 

Origen : buried at Tyre, 265 ; on the text of 
John i. 28, 304 note ; and of Matt. viii. 
28, 373 note. 

Oman (Araunah), 179 note. 

Orontes, R., 110 ; peculiarity of its course, 
275, 400 ; its importance, 399; com¬ 
pared with the Wye, 400. 

Oxus, R., 284. 


Padam-aram (cultivated upland), 128 note. 

Pagan religion : its great localities deeply 
impressive, 154, 192, 227. 

Palestine (Philistia, land of the Philistines) : 
origin of the word, 252; the link 
between Sinai and Lebanon, 111 ; and 
between Assyria and Egypt, 117; cut 
off from the rest of the world, 112 ; 
absence of havens, 113 ; length and 
breadth of, 114 ; presence of both sea 
and mountains, 115 ; confluence of 
East and West, 117 ; ruins of, 118, 
120 ; alteration in climate and pro¬ 
ductiveness, 121 ; contrast to Desert, 
122 ; but monotonous to European eyes, 
136 ; abundance of water, 123 ; ana¬ 
logies with the Western world, 123 ; 
varied natural features of, 124, 125 ; 
mountainous character of, 123, 127 ; 
general elevation of the country, 102, 
127, 129 ; first calflfd Aram, 128 ; 
fenced cities of, 131 ; high places, 132 ; 
want of roads, 134; security of its 



















INDEX. 


531 


mountain districts, 135 ; plains infested 
by the Bedouins, 135 ; pre-eminent in 
the East for flowers, 137 ; scarcity of 
large trees, 138 ; cedars, 139 ; his¬ 
torical trees, 141; palms, 143 ; rocky 
character, 145 ; identification of ancient 
wells, 146 ; tombs, 147; caves, in 
ancient times, 150, in modern times, 
151 ; consecration of grottoes, 152 ; 
legends due to natural features, 153 ; 
contrast of its sacred localities with 
those of Greece, 154, 227. 

Palmer : origin of the term, 144. 

“Palm-trees, city of:” Jericho, 143, 145, 
289, 295, 301; possibly also En-gedi, 
289. 

Palm-trees : on the Nile, xxx., li., 301 ; 
of Palmyra, 8 ; of the Desert, 22, 
26, 68, 99 ; at El- Wddy, 20 ; rarity 
of, in Pal., 99, 143 ; on the mari¬ 
time plains, 144, 145 ; on Olivet, 121, 
144, 184 ; at Jericho, 143, 301 ; at 
En-gedi, 143, 144, 289 ; at Kirjath- 
. Sannab, 161 ; at Abila, 292 note; in 
Esdraelon, 340 ; at Tiberias, 363 ; at 
entrance of Jordan to S. of Galilee, 364 ; 
Palm-tree of Deborah, 145. 

Paneas, 390 ; see Caesarea Philippi. 

Parables of our Lord, 412 ; those relating to 
vineyards, 103, 413; to fig-trees, 414; 
to shepherds, 415 ; to corn-fields, 418, 
419 ; the birds, 419 ; the fish, 420 ; 
the torrent, 422 ; images drawn from 
the humblest objects of life, 425. 

Paradise : origin of word, 507. 

Park-like character of Esdraelon, 341 ; of 
Carmel, 344, 484 ; of the territory of 
Ephraim, 240. 

Paul, St. : visit to Arabia, 50 : pride in 
his tribe, 197: at Caesarea, 259 ; in 
Phoenicia, 263 ; reputed site of his 
conversion, 403. 

+Peleg (stream), 498. 

Pella, 323. 

Persea, 323 ; our Lord's retirement to, 412 ; 
probable scene of parable of the Lost 
Sheep, 416. i 

Perazoth (unwalled villages), 515. 

Peter, St. : his vision at Joppa, 116, 259, 
269; his visit to the Plain of Sharon, 
258 ; his confession at Caesarea Philippi, 
391. 

Petra, 88—92 ; identified with Kadesh, 
95 ; the Holy Place of, 97, 98 ; pro¬ 
phetical curse on, 268. 

Pharpar It. ( Awaj ), 401 note. 

Phiala (bowl) : not the source of the Jor¬ 
dan, 387 note. 

Philip the Tetrarch : builder of Julias, 367, 
374 ; and of Caesarea Philippi, 389. 


Philistines, their origin, 252; towns of, 
252, 329. 

Phoenicia : meaning of word, 262 ; early 
maritime enterprise, 264 ; abundance of 
rivers, 264 ; first settlements, 282 ; 
alliance with northern tribes, 355. 

Philae, xliii., xliv. 

Pi-ha-hiroth : meaning of word, 65 note. 

Pilate, 104, 258. 

Pilgrims : to Mecca, 8 ; to the Jordan, 
308 ; to Jerusalem, 459. 

Pine-trees on Lebanon, 138 note. 

Pisa : Campo Santo at, 443. 

Pisgah : view of Moses from, 130, 294 ; and 
of Balaam, 293 ; position of, 294 note, 
315 ; the word, 489. 

“Plain:” mistranslation of in A. V. for 
Oak, 141 note , 232 note , 234, 236 note , 
332 note, 355 note, 508. 

Plains of Palestine : retained by the Ca- 
naanites, 133, 384; now infested by 
Arabs, 135 ; their agricultural value, 
134. See Esdraelon, Shephelah, and 
Sharon. 

Pompey: advanced on Jerusalem by the 
Bethany road, 167, 175. 

Pools: of Hebron, 102; of Siloam, 179 ; of 
Samaria, 242. 

Poplars on Anti-Libanus, 138 note. 

Porter, Rev. J. L., 398 note, 401 note, 
520. 

Prophecy : the true accomplishment of, 267, 
268, 377. 

“Prophets:” summit of Olivet, 183. 

Prophets: schools of, at Bethel, 219 ; at 
Jericho, 303. 

Ptolemies, the, xliv. 

Ptolemais (Accho, Acre), 260. 

Pyramids, xxx., liii. 

Pythagoras : on Carmel, 345. 


“Quails” : miracle of the, 82. 
Quarantania, 302. 


Races of the Arab Christians round the H. 

Sepulchre, 461. 

Rachel : tomb of, 147. 

Ramah of Benjamin (Er Ram), 210. 

Ramah of Samuel: various supposed sites of, 

220 , 221 . 

Ramathaim (double height), 220 ; site of, 
according to Eusebius and Jerome, 221. 
RamS: said by Schwarze to be Ramathaim, 
221 . 

Rameses, xliii., xlvii., xlviii., 117. 

Ramet-el-Khalil : one supposed site of 
Ramah, 221. 

Ramleh (sandy) : a supposed site of Ramah, 



532 


INDEX. 


221 ; name of the sea-side tract of Phi- 
listia, 251 ; and of Sharon, 255, 270. 

Ramoth Gilead, 316. 

Eds-el-Abiad (the White Cape), 262. 

Eds-el-Ain (head of the spring) : traditional 
visit of Christ to, 272. 

Eds NaJchdra, 260, 262. 

Eds Sasdfeh, M., 18. 

Ravines round Jerusalem, 166, 172, 189. 

Red Sea : origin of the name, 6 note. 

Reuben : pastoral tribe, 319 ; and inactive, 
320. 

Rephidim : battle of, 40. 

Eetem (broom), 21, 79. 

“Rib” (Tzelah) : Hebr. expression for side 
of a mountain, 185 note. 

Richard Coeur-de-Lion, 209, 211, 261 ; at 
Ascalon, 253, 255. 

Rimmon : (the cliff Edmmon ), 210. 

Ritter, Professor C. : his theory of Sinai, 40. 

Roads of Palestine, 134, 213, 222. 

Robinson, Dr. : confirmed, 77, 327 ; cor¬ 
rected, 98, 228. 

Roman and Greek names in Palestine, 229, 
242. 

Roman bridges over Jordan, 290. 

t Rosh (head of a mountain), 488. 

“Round fountain,” the, 375, 376 note. 

Royle, Dr. : identification of the ‘ ‘ mustard 
tree,” 419 note. 

Rubad, castle of : view from, 315. 

Ruins: in Palestine, 118, 120 ; Hebrew 
words for, 119. 

Eiimmon (Rimmon), 210. 


Sacramento R., 276 note. 

Sacraments, the two : their universal force, 
426. 

tSadeh (cultivated field), 484. 

Safed, 363 : sacred city of N. Palestine, 365 ; 
probably the “ city on an hill,” 421. 

Sdfeh: pass of, 113. 

Sakrah, rock of the : described, 177 ; va¬ 
rious explanations of, 178, 179. 

Saleh, Skeykh : tomb of, 56, 79, 461 note. 

Salem, 247. 

Salt lakes of Africa, Asia, and America, 286. 

Saltness of the water of various seas, 286 note. 

Samachon : Greek name of Merom, 383 note. 

Samaria (Shomron), 240 ; its sieges, 241; 
pool of, 242 ; villages of the district, 
329. 

Samaria, the woman of, 238. 

Samaritans, 236, 237 note. 

Samson, 254. 

Sand : in the East and Egypt, xxxiii., 1., 
67, 68 : not the rule of the Desert, 9 ; 
in the Parable of the Torrent, 423. 

Sandstone of Sinai, 8, 10 ; its colour, 11, 


12 ; inscriptions on, 11, 61; at Petra, 
88, 91. 

Santa Casa : see Loretto. 

Sanur: plain and fortress of, 243, 244 note. 
Sardis : capture of, 171. 

Sarepta, 271. 

Saul: his visit to the witch, 337 ; his death, 
and disposal of his body, 338. 

Scala Tyriorum : see Ladder of the Tyrians. 
Scopus : hill of, 183. 

Scythians : their incursion into Palestine, 

333 note. 

Scythopolis (Beth-shan), 333 note , 409. 

Sea, the: “the West” in Hebrew, 116; 

Oriental dread of, 257. 

Sebaste : Roman name of Samaria, 242. 
fSela (cliff), 96, 491. 

Selim I. : builder of walls of Jerusalem, 181. 
Semitic names: their tenacity, 260, 271, 374. 
Sena: one of the summits of Sinai, 42. 

Seneh (acacia): possible origin of name Sinai, 
18 ; crag at Michmash, 201. 

Sennacherib : his advance on Jerusalem, 202 ; 
destruction of his army, 203 note , 253 
note ; legendary site of the event, 153. 
Septuagint: rendering of hyssop, 23 note ; 
Gedor, 159; Zelzah, 222 ; Beth-aven, 
219 note; of 1 Sam. xiv, 16, 19; 201 
note; Moriah and Moreh, 248; Philis¬ 
tines, 252; Sharon, 256, note: the city 
Adam, 298 note; Beth-barah, 335 note ; 
Beth-gan, 342 note; Madon, 383 note; 
Mizpeh, 384 note; Adummim, 416 note. 
See further notes to 487, 492, 506, 513, 
515, 516, 517, and Appendix passim. 
Sepphoris, or Dio Caesarea, 357, 358. 
Sepulchres. See Holy S. and Tombs. 

Ser (myrrh), 18, 79. 

Serbal, M. : possible derivation of, 18 ; 
claims of Serbal to be Sinai, 39, 40 ; 
ancient sanctity of, 40; ascent of, 71; 
and view from summit, 7 2 . 

Seth : tomb of, near Damascus, 405. 

Shaalbim (jackals), 162 note. 

+Sharon (smooth), plain of, 255 ; forest of, 
121, 256; meaning of word, 479. 
tShaveh (dale), valley of, 246, 478. 
Shaveh-Kiriathaim, 247. 

Shechem : capital of Ephraim, 229, 235 ; 
well watered, 231. 

Shechinah : tradition of its sojourn on Olivet, 
186. 

+Shefi (bare hill), 490. 
fShen (crag), 492. 

Shells on the shores of Red Sea, 83 ; of 
Gennesareth, 363. 

fShephelah : the low land of Philistia, 251, 
480. 

Sheriat-el-Khebir (Jordan), 278 note, 280. 
Sheriat-el-Mandhur (Hieromax), 278 note. 







INDEX. 


533 


Sheykh Saleh. See Wddy-es-Sheykh , and 
Saleh . 

tShichor (Nile), 496. 

Shiloh (Seildn), 496; sanctuary of Ephraim, 
229 ; its site long lost, 228. 

Shittah, Shittim ( Sayal ), 21, 69. 

Shomron (Samaria), 240. 

Shual: (fox or jackal), 162 note, 196 note. 

Shubeibeh, castle of, 389. 

Shuhh Barada, 405. 

Shukh Mousa,’ 76. 

Siddim : see Yale of S. 

Sidon, 265, 266. 

Sihor : see Shichor. 

Sik, at Petra, 89—92. 

Siloam, pools of, 179. 

Simeon : lot and fortunes of the tribe, 160, 
161. 

Sinai: origin of name, 18, 31 ; special use of 
■word, 31 note; see Gebel Mousa, 
Serbal, Gebel Katherin ; and, Moun¬ 
tains of Sinai. 

Sinaitic inscriptions, 59—62, 70, 72, 73, 80. 

Sindian (oak), 140. 

Sir-i-kol, Lake, 284. 

Sisera, 331, 332. 

Skiddaw : same level as Jerusalem, 127. 

Soba : possibly Ramathaim-ZopAim, 221. 

Sodom (burning), 283. 

Solomon : his pools and gardens, 104, 507. 

“ Solomon, city of,” 176. 

“ South ” frontier of Palestine, 159. 

Spain : occurrence of Arabic names in, 16, 
480. 

Sphinx, the, liv. 

Springs : of the Desert of Sinai, 19, 79, 80 ; 
of Palestine: their abundance, 123; dis¬ 
tinguished from wells, 146 ; round the 
Sea of Galilee, 366. See Ain. 

Spring below the Temple, 179, 180. 

Spring of Annunciation at Nazareth, 359. 

St. Louis : founder of the Convent at Carmel, 
345. 

St. Saba, Convent of, 290. 

Stags (Ajalon), 204. 

“Star of Bethlehem,” 137. 

Stirling, plain of : analogy with Esdraelon, 
329 note . 

Stone fences to the fields of Judasa, 103, 
413. 

■fSuccoth (booths), 515, 516. 

Surafend (Sarepta), 271. 

Sycaminopolis ( Caipha ), 145. 

Sychar (drunken), 219 note. 

Sycomores in Palestine, 145 ; on the Upper 
Jordan, 385. 

Syria : general geological features, 4 ; origin 
of word, 265. 

Syrian Christians : their chapel at the H, 
Sepulchre, 460. 


Taanach, 331. 

Tabigah, 376. 

Tabor, M., 328; described, 342; in early 
times the sacred mount of the northern 
tribes, 343 ; not the Mount of Beati¬ 
tudes, 361; nor the scene of the Trans¬ 
figuration, 343 ; view of, from Mt. of 
Beatitudes, 421. 

Tabor, oak of, 2i2, 508. 

Tadmor, meaning of the word, 8 note. 

Tajo of Andalusia : compared to ravines of 
Jerusalem, 171. 

Tamarisk (Eshel), 22, 68, 80, 509. 

Tamyras R. {Tamar), 110 note. 

“Tares” (Zizania, Zuwdn), 419. 

Tayibeh (Ophrah), 210. 

Tayibeh, in the Desert : see Wddy T. 

fTealah (conduit), 498. 

“Tears of Jacob,” 154, 244 note. 

Tel (heap), how used in the Bible, 119 note, 
199 note. 

Tel-el-Fulil (probably Gibeah of Saul), 210. 

Tel-el-Hajar , (possible site of Ai), 200 note. 

Tel-el-Kadi (hill of the judge), 386. 

Tel-Farash (hill of Joshua), 385 note. 

Tel-IMm, 376. 

Tel-Kishon, T. Sadi , or T. Kasis: a knoll 
below Carmel, 347. 

Tentura (Dor), 256. 

Terebinth (Elah, Butm), in Palestine, 22 
note, 140, 508 : valley of the T., 203. 

Terraces, on the hills of Pal., 137 ; of the 
Jordan, 290, 298. 

Thebes in Egypt, xxxv. 

Thrupp, Mr., his theories on Jerusalem, 
170 note, 172 note, 189 note. 

Tiberias, 363, 371 ; metropolis of Jewish 
race for three centuries, 364 ; and holy 
city of the north, 365 ; built by Herod 
Antipas, 367. 

Tih (wanderings), desert of, 7. 

+Tirah (Bedouin castle), 88, 515. 

Tirzah : Palace of Jeroboam, 240. 

Titus : his siege of Jerusalem, 177. 

“Tomb of Hiram,” 272. 

Tombs of Egypt, xxxiii., xxxiv., liii. ; of the 
Kings at Thebes, xxxix., xli. ; of 
Ibises at Memphis, lii.; of Palestine, 
147, 241. 

“Tombs of the Prophets,” cave in Olivet : 
its history, 447, 448. 

T6r, mountains of the, 8, 9. 

Transfiguration, the : probably not on Tabor, 
343 ; but on Hermon, 392. 

“Triumphal entry” of Christ into Jerusalem, 
187. 

Tyre, 272; derivation of name, 265 ; its 
small size, 264, 266. 

Tyropeeon, at Jerusalem, 166, 172. 

fTzur (rock), 265, 420. 



INDEX. 


534 






Um-Khalid, 271. 

Um-Sh6mer : meaning of name, 18 ; highest 
mountain in the Sinai range, 12 ; not 
yet explored, 39 note ; mysterious noises 
heard from, 14, 39 note. 

Urtas , 104, 507. 

Urumiah, salt lake of, 286 note. 

Utah, salt lake of, America, 286. 


Vale of Siddim (fields), 281 ; compared to 
Plain of Gennesareth, 366, 377. 

Valley of the Jordan : its unparalleled depth, 
111, 280; level of, with respect to the 
Red Sea, 285 ; called Aulon and Ghor, 
277, and Arabah, 279 note, 288 note, 
481 ; width of, 291. 

Vegetation of Sinai, 18, 21, 22, 68, 79 ; 
formerly more abundant, 26; of Pa¬ 
lestine, 137. 

Vespasian : his sacrifice on Carmel, 347 
note. 

Vine: cultivation of, in Judah, 162, 412 ; 
emblem of Israel, 162 ; parables relating 
to, 413. 

Virgin, tomb of the, on Olivet, 449. 

Volcanic agency : traces of in Palestine, 279, 
283, 285, 363. 


Wddy : meaning of word, 15, 70 ; the roads 
and rivers of the Desert, 17 ; origin of 
their names, 18 ; mountains of Sinai 
called after them, 15 ; equivalent to 
the Hebrew Nachal, 496. 

Wddy Abou-Hamad (father of figs), 18, 71 ; 
contains a few inscriptions, 59. 

Wddy Abou-Sheykh, leading to Petra, 85. 

Wddy Aleyat, at base of Serbal, 71; con¬ 
tains many inscriptions, 59. 

Wddy Alias, possibly the Cherith, 299 note 

Wddy Arabah, 85. 

Wddy Chusech, 305 note. 

Wddy, El (The Wady), its luxuriant palm 
grove, 20 note, 22 note. 

Wddy el-Ain (the spring), 80 ; its brook 
perennial, 19 note, 82 ; vegetation in, 
22 . 

Wddy el-Deir (the convent), 44, 78. 

Wddy-el-Muogede, 200 note. 

Wddy-er-Raheh (rest) : probably the scene 
of the giving of the Law, 42, 44, 76 ; 
long unknown, 44. 

Wddy-es-Sheylch (the saint) : largest of the 
Sinaitic w&dys, 17, 42; why so called, 
31, 56, 78, 79. 

Wddy Feih, opposite Tiberias, 372. 

Wddy Feirdn : the Oasis of the Sinaitic 
Desert, 20, 42 ; possible scene of the 
battle of Rephidim, 40; its brook peren¬ 


nial, 19 note; inscriptions in, 59; 
vegetation in, 70, 73. 

Wddy Fowar, 198. 

Wddy Ghazaleh, 80. 

Wddy Ghurundel (on west of Peninsula of 
Sinai) : palms at, 26, 27; possibly 
Elim, 68. 

Wddy Ghurundel (between Akaba and 
Petra), 85. 

Wddy Hebrdn, 38 ; its brook perennial, 
19 note. 

Wddy Howdr (the division), in the Arabah, 
86 . 

Wddy Hudcrdh, 80; by some identified 
with Hazeroth, 81. 

Wddy ffymam (pigeons), 293 note, 375, 
422 note. 

Wddy Ithm (between Akaba and Petra), 85. 

Wddy Kara, 230. 

Wddy Kelt, possibly the Cherith, 197, 299 
note, 300. 

Wddy Kibab : probably the “ Valley of 
Gerar,” 159. 

Wddy Kyd, 19. 

Wddy Leja: named after Jethro’s daughter, 
35 ; contains the Rock of Moses, 46. 

Wddy Megdra (the cave) : sandstone of, 11, 
13 ; inscriptions in, 11, 28, 59. 

Wddy Modhil: under Gebel Shebibeh, 85. 

Wddy Mokatteb (writing) : described, 60 ; 
inscriptions in, 11, 51, 59, 60, 70. 

Wddy Mousa (Moses) : modern name for 
the valley of Petra, 90. 

Wddy SalaTca: contains a perennial brook, 
19 note. 

Wddy Sasdfeh (willow), 18. 

Wddy Saydl (acacia) : why so called, 18, 79. 

Wddy Sebdyeh: scene of the giving of the 
Law, according to Ritter and Laborde, 
42 note, 44, 75, 76. 

Wddy Shetldl (cataract), 38, 39 ; reason of 
name, 16 ; vegetation, 22 note. 

Wddy Shouaib (Hobab), 35. 

Wddy Sidri (thorn), 18, 70; contains in¬ 
scriptions, 59. 

Wddy Solab, (the cross): has a few inscrip¬ 
tions, 59. 

Wddy Somvyrah, 79. 

Wddy Sumghy, 19, 81. 

Wddy Suweinit: scene of battle of Ai, 198 ; 
the “passage of Michmash,” 201; on 
the frontier of Judah and Benjamin, 
218. 

Wddy Tayibeh: vegetation of, 18, 19 ; pro¬ 
bably the scene of the ‘ * encampment by 
the Red Sea,” 37; possibly Elim, 37, 
69. 

Wddy Tudrik, 36, 37. 

Wddy Tubal: red sandstone, 85. 
jl Vddy Urtds, 163. 


> 



INDEX. 


585 


Wddy Useit: Elim according to Laborde, 26, 
68 ; palms, 27 note. 

Wddy Wettir , 81. 

Walls of Jerusalem, 181. 

Warm springs of Palestine, 279, 289, 363, 
365. 

Water-lilies in Pal., 422. 

Water-shed between Dead Sea and Gulf of 
Akaba, 85, 86. 

“Weeds, sea of,” 6 note , 83. 

Wells of Palestine, 146, 159, 161 ; of Beth¬ 
lehem, 164 ; of Jacob, 190 ; below the 
Rock of the Sakrah, 178, 179 note; near 
Ajalon— Bir-el-Khebir , 209. 

West, the, in Hebrew the same word as “the 
Sea,” 116. 

White Cape ( Ras-el-Abiad ), 262. 

“Whited sepulchres,” 421. 

Wild beasts: towns deriving names from, 161, 
162 note, 196 note. 

Wild cattle of Palestine, 317. 

Wilderness (Midbar), 23, 244 note , 480. 


Willis, Professor: on the Sakrah 179, 455 
note; on the tombs of Joseph and Nico- 
demus, 452. 

Wye, R., compared to the Orontes, 400. 


Zaanaim (wanderers) : oak of, 142 note, 508. 

Zalmon, M. : possibly Ebal, 236 note. 

Zaretan, 298 note. 

Zeboim (hyaenas) : ravine of, 162 note, 196 
note. 

Zebulun, 355. 

Zeeb (wolf), 333. 

Zelzah : lxx rendering of, 222. 

Zerin (Jezreel), 341, 342. 

Zimmermann’s Map, 346. 

Zion : the stronghold of Jerusalem, 170 
city of David, 189 ; theories of Fer- 
gusson and Thrupp, 170 note, 172 note. 

Ziph, wood of, 121. 

Zuwan (£i£iviov, “ tares”), 419. 


T11E END. 


BRADBURY AND EVANS, PRINTERS, WHITEFRIARS. 













































































































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